winged victory of samothrace (at the louvre)
They’ve been recovering her bits and pieces for years – finding her palm and puzzling out that, yes, this was her forefinger and that her thumb, this is what her wing must have looked like, her arm, her open mouth. They have a mental picture, now, of all the pieces that were left in rubble when she first found her way to the head of the staircase; they see each phantom limb like they had fully crafted her prostheses, just failed to weld the joints together, had chosen to leave that step to imagination.
I, for one, preferred her headless. My mother thought I was being morbid, stop that, let’s go to the Mona Lisa. She didn’t realize that it wasn’t the missing chunks of would-be flesh that I found captivating, but the way the remnants looked in their wake. The fact that she still held her expression, despite the lack of facial twitches or limby gestures, held it in the folds of a seabreezed cloth and weary feathers. It wasn’t the headlessness, but the way her frame looked headless – still conscious, still moving, as though muscle memory truly lived in her stone muscles and not the phantom brain.
