The city of Arles asks the Louvre to return a Roman statue of Venus to Provence

Arles Mayor Patrick De Carolis has written a letter to French Culture Minister Roselyne Bachelot, co-signed with Congresswoman Monica Michel, requesting that the Louvre return the so-called Venus of Arles, a famous statue depicting the goddess of beauty, to the Provençal town: it is a Roman copy from a Greek original, found at the Roman theater in Arles in 1651, then placed in the town hall, and in 1683 donated by the town to King Louis XIV, who had it displayed at the Palace of Versailles, after being supplemented of the missing parts (the arms, part of the neck and a hip) by sculptor François Girardon. In 1798 it was then moved to the Louvre, where it remains today.

“We would be grateful,” the missive reads, “if you could consider the possibility that the Louvre might grant this work on deposit to the city that saw its birth. It would be a fine example of the priority to territories that the government wants to put in place, but also a formidable resource for Arles and its surroundings.” The idea, Mayor De Carolis clarified while speaking to Agence France Press, is not to reappropriate the statue, partly because it is not a stolen work. “However,” he said, “I think that in 2021, when Arles celebrates the 40th anniversary of the inscription of eight of its historic monuments to the Unesco World Heritage Site, it would be nice if the state made a gesture like ’we don’t give it back to you but we leave it in storage for you.’”

De Carolis, of obvious Italian descent, is no stranger to the field of culture: a journalist specializing in cultural issues, he was also formerly director of the Musée Marmottan-Monet in Paris and president of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, and he says he knows well the sense of attachment a museum feels toward one of its works, but he also stresses that a concession in storage would be “a friendly, cultural gesture, and a gesture of gratitude.”

Arles residents know the work very well, however: not only did it come to town in 2013 as a loan as part of an exhibition, but since the year of its donation to Louis XIV at Arles City Hall there has been a replica. At the moment, the Louvre has not commented on the request, but on the museum’s agenda, a meeting between De Carolis and the Louvre’s director, Jean-Luc Martinez, is apparently already marked on the agenda in the coming days.

Image: a detail of the Venus de Arles.

The city of Arles asks the Louvre to return a Roman statue of Venus to Provence

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