The Damage Is the Work Now

The Louvre's record for the Winged Victory of Samothrace lists what is missing with the flatness of a packing note: head, neck, both arms, part of the left bust and the rear torso, the right wing, the right foot, the left calf and foot, the lower rear drapery.

It does not say why any of it is gone. Two and a half thousand years of public writing about this object, and the museum that owns it records absence without explanation, because there is nothing to explain. Things broke.

What interests me is what happened next: the loss stopped being loss and became the identity. Nobody wants the head back. A restored Victory with a face would be a different and much worse object, and everybody knows it, and nobody can say exactly why.

The Winged Victory of Samothrace, about 200 to 175 BC. Parian marble on a Lartos marble prow, 564 cm overall. Musée du Louvre, Ma 2369. Photograph by Shonagon, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Five objects that are now defined by what happened to them

1. The Victory, and the part of it that is plaster

Charles Champoiseau, French vice-consul at Adrianople, dug at Samothrace from 6 March to 7 May 1863 and found the torso on 13 April, with, as the record has it, numerous fragments of drapery and feathers. It reached Paris on 11 May 1864.

The wings were not understood at first. Neither was the base. The Louvre's own account says the statue was first pieced together without its wings, and that the grey marble pieces found near it turned out to be a ship. Adding the base and the wings, in the museum's phrase, changed everything.

Three details that complicate the romance of it. The left wing is original marble and the right wing is nineteenth-century plaster, so half the most famous silhouette in European sculpture is a restorer's guess. The figure is Parian marble from Paros and the prow is Lartos marble from Rhodes, which is to say the object is from two islands and the 2013 cleaning is what made that legible, because before it both read as one dull grey. And a central block from the upper rear is still in the museum at Samothrace, so the work is physically divided between two countries.

2. The Venus de Milo, and a decision made in 1821

Aphrodite, known as the Venus de Milo, 150 to 125 BC. Parian marble, 204 cm. Musée du Louvre, Ma 399. Photograph by Caeciliusinhorto, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The story that the arms were lost in a tussle on the beach between French sailors and locals is not documented anywhere. The scholarly position is that they had been broken off centuries earlier and were already gone in the ruins when a farmer turned her up on 8 April 1820.

The fact that matters is the next one. Restoring ancient sculpture was standard practice. She was not restored, and the reason is recorded: on the recommendation of Quatremère de Quincy she was exhibited in the state in which she was found. His argument was not purist. He believed she was half of a group, and since the other half was gone entirely, restoration was not possible.

A conservation decision taken for a technical reason in 1821 became, over two centuries, the thing the object is famous for.

3. The Parthenon sculptures, and a cleaning nobody authorised

The British Museum's own research publication does not soften it. Ian Jenkins, writing for the museum in 2001: in 1937 and 1938, in preparation for a new gallery given by Lord Duveen, an unauthorised cleaning of the Parthenon Sculptures was carried out.

The dealer Joseph Duveen was funding the gallery and pressing for the marbles to be whiter. A foreman of masons and six workers went at roughly sixty percent of the metopes with copper scrapers and carborundum. Director John Forsdyke found it in September 1938 and stopped it. The board of inquiry chaired by Lord Macmillan concluded that the damage was obvious and could not be exaggerated, then examined only the pedimental sculptures and left out the metopes and frieze, which had been given identical treatment.

How much was actually lost is genuinely unresolved, and the spread is remarkable. Contemporary estimates went as high as two and a half millimetres. Modern assessment puts it at 0.15 millimetres or less, and one analysis of a single figure found no measurable loss of original surface at all. A seventeen-fold disagreement about how bad the worst-known conservation scandal in Britain actually was.

4. The Pietà, and the glass that is now part of the work

On Pentecost Sunday, 21 May 1972, a man went over the rail in St Peter's with a geologist's hammer and struck Michelangelo's Pietà fifteen times, breaking the Virgin's left arm at the elbow, taking a piece from her nose and chipping an eyelid.

Over a hundred fragments were recovered and reattached with powdered Carrara marble. During the work the restorers found a letter M carved on Mary's palm that nobody had recorded before. It went back on display within ten months, behind glass.

The Vatican replaced that glass in 2024, and the specification is the most telling document in this article. Nine shatterproof panes, 24.5 millimetres thick instead of the original 19, rated to withstand up to twenty-six hammer or axe blows and to resist a nine-millimetre pistol. The work is now inseparable from a defensive object whose dimensions are expressed in how many times it can be hit.

The Vatican's own account of the 1972 attack does not name the man who did it. Fifty years on, the institution still declines to give him the credit of a name, which is itself a curatorial decision about what the object is allowed to carry.

5. Bamiyan, and the argument about whether to rebuild

The larger Buddha of Bamiyan, photographed in 1963. UNESCO / A. Lezine, via Wikimedia Commons.

Fifty-five metres and thirty-eight metres, carved into the cliff, radiocarbon dated to roughly 544 to 595 for the smaller and 591 to 644 for the larger, so the smaller one is the older. They were not free-standing statues but reliefs, their bodies merging into the rock at the back, their details modelled in mud and straw over wooden armatures, their upper faces made of enormous wooden masks.

Destroyed over several weeks from 2 March 2001. UNESCO inscribed the valley in 2003 and put it on the list of World Heritage in Danger the same year, where it remains.

What makes Bamiyan the sharpest case is that the question got formally put. A UNESCO expert working group in 2011 issued thirty-nine recommendations, and among them was a split decision: leave the larger western niche empty as a monument to the destruction, and study the feasibility of rebuilding the eastern one. One as absence, one as reconstruction. Roughly half the fragments are thought to be reassemblable.

UNESCO's public line on the niches, on the twentieth anniversary, was that they are a perpetual reminder of our duty to protect cultural heritage. On rebuilding, deliberately unresolved: each case is unique.

What actually happens when loss becomes the identity

Table 1. Five objects, five completely different authorities, and only one of them wrote the decision down as a decision.

Video. "Restauration de la Victoire de Samothrace: le retour de la Victoire restaurée," Musée du Louvre.

Three things I take from this

• The state a thing settles into gets read as intentional, whatever caused it. Nobody intended the Victory to be headless. Everybody now experiences the headlessness as part of the design, and any proposal to fix it would read as vandalism. This happens to products constantly: a limitation ships, users build habits around it, and five years later removing it is a breaking change.

• Write down why you did not fix something. Quatremère's reasoning survives, so we know the Venus's armlessness was a judgement rather than neglect. The Victory's plaster wing has no comparable record, so it sits in the object unexamined. The difference between those two is purely documentation.

• An empty niche is a legitimate design decision, and it needs a committee. Bamiyan is the only case here where somebody deliberately chose absence and said so in writing. That is harder than it sounds, because the pressure is always to fill the gap, and the argument for leaving it has to be made explicitly or it loses by default.

A detail-by-detail walk through the Victory itself, including the curl of hair that the 2014 cleaning found under nineteenth-century plaster, is on my Korean blog: 베이니월드.

Sources

Object record, losses, materials, dimensions and the plaster right wing: Musée du Louvre, Ma 2369. The right hand as a separate object: Ma 2369 bis. The 1863 discovery and the 1883 installation: Musée du Louvre. Venus de Milo record and the Quatremère de Quincy decision: Musée du Louvre, Ma 399. The 1930s cleaning: Ian Jenkins, Cleaning and Controversy: The Parthenon Sculptures 1811 to 1939, British Museum Research Publications, 2001. The Pietà's new glass: Vatican News, November 2024. Bamiyan dimensions, dating and status: UNESCO World Heritage Centre, and the rebuild debate in Masanori Nagaoka (ed.), The Future of the Bamiyan Buddha Statues.

Not asserted here because I could not settle it: whether the Victory was installed on the Daru staircase in 1883 or 1884, the museum sources disagreeing with each other; how much of the Parthenon surface was actually lost; and the story of the Venus's arms being lost in a scuffle, for which no primary document exists either way.