The Venus of Milo

The Venus of Milo is one of Paul Carus’s many short books on art, philosophy, and culture, working in the kind of accessible scholarly nonfiction that the Open Court Publishing Company specialized in. Carus was a German born American philosopher and prolific author, best remembered as the long time editor of Open Court and of the journals The Open Court and The Monist. His wider catalogue includes books on Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, mathematics, philosophy, and various other subjects that the Open Court program engaged with.

The Venus of Milo as a subject points to the famous classical Greek statue, discovered on the Greek island of Milos in 1820 and now one of the most famous works in the Louvre’s collection. The statue has been the subject of substantial scholarly attention across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with various questions about its dating, its original sculptor, the missing arms, and its wider artistic and cultural significance generating ongoing debate. Carus’s contribution to the wider literature on the statue would have engaged with these questions from the kind of comparative cultural and philosophical perspective that distinguished his wider scholarly work.

For students of Open Court Publishing, of late nineteenth and early twentieth century American scholarly publishing, or of the wider engagement of American intellectuals with classical Greek art, Carus’s writings on art and culture remain useful primary sources. Many of his books are now in the public domain.