Winged Victory

By Diana Moskovitz

When I finally visited the bewildering Parisian maze and military-castle-turned-royal-residence-turned-grand-museum stuffed with cultural treasures otherwise known as the Louvre, I didn’t have the Winged Victory of Samothrace on my to-see list. I bumped into it with a friend while we were on our way to see something else… the Mona Lisa?… the grand hall of the Italian Renaissance? We were en route, in any case, when I glanced up to see what looked like pieces of a boat and, atop them, a giant marble statue nine feet tall: a transcendently mobile human body wrapped in Hellenistic Greek clothing and leaning into the invisible headwinds with wings outspread. It’s headless, but after spending time in the Louvre among the classical statuary, that hardly surprises. Marble statues centuries old are a lesson in the fragility of extremities: noses are the first to go, and arms can be a real hazard. 

The statue depicts Niké, the goddess of Victory. In other words, the unknown sculptor of this enormous and beautiful figure was aiming at the divine—and when you get to the top of the Daru staircase, near the apex of all that French culture wishes to show the world, in one of the grandest spots in the grandest museum in one of the world’s loveliest cities, and face this breathtaking thing, you can’t help thinking that goal was achieved.

The sculpture is Greek, not French, and the Greeks would like it back, understandably. The matter of rightful ownership is an ongoing tension within the Louvre’s stately French walls, complicating appreciation of the museum’s extensive collection of Egyptian artifacts, the Greek Venus de Milo, the great hall of Italian Renaissance paintings, and the museum’s most famous piece of all, the Italian Mona Lisa. There’s a certain beauty in the humanism of the idea that some of the most powerful curators of culture on Earth could and would give pride of place to that which is not strictly their own, except insofar as its greatness is human. 

Yet beneath all that splendor and grace runs that nagging feeling, familiar in many grand museums. How did all this get here? And how much of that is attributable, not to egalitarianism, but to plain stealing? The power of the Winged Victory, and great art like it, is such that you might forget all those questions when you are standing in its shadow.