The Venus de Milo, was created by a master perfumer, Jean-Christophe Hérault, who set this sculpture to a scent using an ardent olfactory triptych of mandarin orange, jasmine, and amber: pure seduction.

This perfume challenge echoes the exceptional fate of this statue, which was rediscovered by chance two centuries ago amidst the ancient ruins on the island of Milo, and which has lived a thousand adventures since then.

Ultimately, aside from its wanderings, the most extraordinary aspect of this statue remains the endless of power of fascination that it holds over so many great artists, from Rodin to Miles Davis and David Lynch, who have fallen in love with her.

"I am as beautiful oh mortals, as a dream in stone..." Charles Baudelaire 

FROM THE LOUVRE TO AN OPALINE BOTTLE : PURE SEDUCTION

What would the Venus de Milo smell like if we met her on the street? As envisioned by Jean-Christophe Hérault, the nose who designed this Eau Triple for Officine Universelle Buly: “I imagined Venus as a floral perfume. It is an homage to femininity. She is the goddess of love. Her feminine body is intentionally highlighted. On the one hand, you have a bouquet of floral notes and at the same time, this is marble we’re talking about: a cold material, a solemn silence, no facial expression. So, I tried to transcribe this sentiment into a perfume using an ambered, woody, modern structure.”

Venus, or the expression of a bounty of flowers in a bouquet, enhanced by jasmine and its almost carnal note. The majestic flower is picked at dawn, when its perfume is at its peak, before being joyfully wrapped in spices and musk accords. To incarnate the magnificence of the sculpture, the perfumer summoned intense hesperidic notes such as mandarin, the fruit of an elegant bush, the cousin of the orange. When it was imported in Europe in the 19th century, mandarin orange swept over France, Italy, Spain, and... Greece, where it started to be cultivated in the luxuriant orchards of Chios. A symbol of abundance, it lends its mild sweet and sour notes to the marble and gives it life and movement. Amber resin, a scented breath of air—as well as an artistic material since Prehistory —subtly darkens the masterpiece with its fierce notes. Halfway between wood and tobacco, bright amber brings the Venus a golden sparkle, sensual and hypnotic.

In a few weeks, at the end of August, this unique perfume will come in the form of two body care treatments: a Huile Antique, a dry, perfumed oil imbued with a regenerating, restructuring compound made from sesame, apricot kernel, and coconut oil, and a Lait Virginal, a scented body lotion of the perfect softness and creaminess.

THE EXTRAORDINARY TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS OF THE VENUS DE MILO

In early April 1820, a young French sailor who was wild about archeology, Olivier Voutier, while idling during a stay on the island of Milo in the Cyclades, was visiting an ancient site when he came across a Greek farmer, Yorgos Kendrôtas, who, while hunting for construction materials, had made an incredible find: two massive chunks, a bust and a magnificent fold of fabric, which were extracted from the ground. He sketched it and immediately informed the French consular authorities so that they could acquire this treasure, a goddess whose features reminded him of the woman of his dreams, Catherine Brest, wife of the local French Consul. The French Ambassador to Constantinople decided to buy it from the Greek authorities to give it to Louis XVIII, and at the end of a series of diplomatic jousts between the Ottomans and the French that were as tense as they were fantastical, she finally embarked for France, arriving one year later at the Louvre museum.

A monumental statue—measuring more than two meters in height—the Venus de Milo was sculpted in marble from Paros, a particularly fine-grained, almost translucid white marble. Her exceptional fold of fabric and her spiral posture bear witness to the excellence and even genius of a sculptor whose name we will never know, who carved the statue most likely in the 2nd century BCE.

This work is unique for being incomplete.
Who is she? Although one of her arms was found at the site on Milo, the attempts at its restoration have never been conclusive. Was she a Danaïde carrying an amphora, Artemis the goddess of Nature brandishing a bow, or a muse with her lyre?

Even if a left hand that would traditionally be carrying the apple of discord has never been found, her identity was decided as being that of Venus, goddess of love, one of the rare representations of a bare-breasted woman in Ancient Greece.

In the two centuries that the Venus de Milo has spent at the Louvre, she has survived several wars. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, she spent months in the greatest secrecy in the basement of the Paris Prefecture, and then, during the Commune, she barely escaped a fire before returning to the Louvre, where she was reassembled with a more upright posture.

On the day when WWII was declared, September 3, 1939, the Venus de Milo was evacuated in one day according to a plan hatched by the Director of the Louvre, Jacques Jaujard, along with 4,000 other extraordinary works that were hidden away in châteaux in the countryside, far from the bombs and the strategic targets. Prepared with ropes to hold the two pieces together (see the photograph below) and placed in a reinforced trunk, the statue left in secret along with the Winged Victory of Samothrace to the Château de Valençay, the property of the Duc de Talleyrand, who was protected by his German title Duc de Sagan. In June 1940, as German troops entered Paris, the museum seemed completely abandoned, filled only with thousands of empty frames. The Louvre reopened in August 1945 after the Allied victory and the return of all its works.

The last—and highly epic—voyage of the Venus de Milo took place in April 1964, when she traveled with great pomp along with Georges Pompidou, acting on the advice of his Minister of Culture, André Malraux, during his official visit to Japan. The statue suffered from this trip, because it was decided to transport her in one piece and not two, and the Louvre’s restorers had to repair the damages on the spot.

The welcome given in Tokyo to the most famous statue in the world was triumphal. Once more, the entire world paid homage to her exceptional beauty.

LOVERS ALL 

Since her arrival at the Louvre in 1821, the Venus de Milo has unleashed the greatest passions. She has fascinated artists, writers, sculptors, and many others who have fallen in love with her eternal beauty.

She undoubtedly inspired Delacroix in 1830 for his incredible Liberty Leading the People, half naked, draped in a fabric made from a flag and half turned towards the crowd behind her. We also find her in a verse by Charles Baudelaire, “I am as beautiful, oh mortals, as a dream in stone….”, in studies by Paul Cézanne, and in a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke.

Her greatest admirer was undoubtedly Auguste Rodin, who, throughout his life, never stopped visiting the Louvre to gaze upon her. In 1914 he wrote a long, impassioned essay about the statue: “To the poets, the searchers, the humble artists, amidst the tumult of the city, you provide long moments of refuge. Mutilated, you remain whole in their eyes. If the outrage of time has been allowed, it has been to show that a trace remains of its impious, impotent efforts. You are not a vain, sterile statue, the image of some unreal, Empyrean goddess. You stand ready to act, you breathe, you are Woman, and that is your glory.”

The Venus de Milo, always a muse, was a bit mistreated in the 20th century by some artists: Niki de Saint Phalle shot her up with bright colors, Magritte put her in handcuffs, Dali turned her into a chest of drawers, and Arman frenetically sliced her lengthwise.

More lyrically, jazzman Miles Davis turned her into a be-bop track on his album The Birth of Cool recorded in 1949, and Boris Vian sang of her as if she were a goddess of surrealist love.

Last but not least, that most esoteric of all film directors, David Lynch, gave her a place of honor in his work: in the third season of his baffling series Twin Peaks in 2017, the statue lives in the Black Lodge, the supreme enigma, transforming herself into another Venus from time to time, Lynch switching her out in various scenes with the Venus of Arles, featuring only one arm, and an intact Medici Venus. This stone idol thus became a symbol of an eternal mystery.