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Happy Birthday to the Famous No Armed Lady

On this day in 1820, Yorgos Kentrotas, a Greek peasant, discovered the Venus de Milo inside a buried niche within the ancient city ruins of Milos, the current village of Trypiti, on the island of Milos in the Aegean, which was then a part of the Ottoman Empire.
Initially it was attributed to the sculptor Praxiteles, but from an inscription that was on its plinth, the statue is thought to be the work of Alexandros of Antioch. Created sometime between 130 and 100 BC, the statue is believed to depict Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty; however, some scholars claim it is the sea-goddess Amphitrite, who was venerated on Milos. It is a marble sculpture, slightly larger than life size at 203 cm (6 ft 8 in) high. Part of an arm and the original plinth were lost following its discovery.
The consensus of historians is that the statue was found in two large pieces (the upper torso and the lower draped legs) along with several pillars, fragments of the upper left arm and left hand holding an apple, and an inscribed plinth.
In 1871, during the Paris Commune uprising, many public buildings were burned. The Venus de Milo statue was secretly removed from the Louvre in an oak crate and hidden in the basement of the Prefecture of Police. Though the Prefecture was burned, the statue survived undamaged.
The great fame of the Venus de Milo originated during a nineteenth century propaganda effort by the French authorities. In 1815, France had returned the Medici Venus to the Italians after it had been looted by Napoleon Bonaparte. The loss of the Medici Venus, regarded as one of the finest classical sculptures in existence, caused the French to promote the Venus de Milo as a greater treasure than that which they recently had lost.
In the autumn of 1939, the Venus was packed for removal from the Louvre in anticipation of the outbreak of war. Scenery trucks from the Comédie-Française transported the Louvre's masterpieces to safer locations in the countryside. During World War II, the statue was sheltered safely in the Château de Valençay, along with the Winged Victory of Samothrace and Michelangelo's Slaves.
The statue has become a touchstone of modern civilization and spawned many appearances in modern art and popular culture. One such is Salvador Dali's Venus de Milo with Drawers (it is what it sounds like; see below). It also appeared in the Simpson's episode "Homer Badman," where Homer is accused of sexual harassment when he peels a Gummy Venus from the backside of his babysitter, who sat on it. And, of course, it appears in the Chuck Berry song "Brown-eyed Handsome Man:"
"The Venus de Milo was a beautiful lass
She held the world in the palm of her hand
She lost both her arms in a wrestling Match
To win a brown eyed handsome man."

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