Abstract

Much has been said about the Venus de Milo, particularly in France, where the circumstances of its discovery and acquisition in 1820 have triggered a steady flow of studies and commentaries from the most prominent figures have entered endless debates about who amongst Voutier, Marcellus, Brest or Dumont d’Urville had made the most significant contribution to the subject. However, the “local” dimension of this event, when not ignored altogether, has generally been reduced to the comments of contemporary witnesses, almost all French, thus resulting in a highly Eurocentric, or even Gallocentric, narrative. This is all the more surprising given that the work file for the statue at the Louvre includes a copy of a bilingual Ottoman document – in Greek and Turkish – about this case; translations of this document, dating back to 1820, are kept in several French fonds. While these unpublished sources cannot radically modify our knowledge on the subject, their systematic examination nevertheless enables to revisit the event with a critical eye, to partially fill some historiographical gaps in the “grand” narrative and to retrace the surprising story of a document, the original of which has yet to be discovered.