We now come to the Hall of the so-called =Venus of Milo=—an absurd mistranslation of the French name: the idiomatic English would be either “the Melos Venus,” “the Melian Venus,” or, better still, “the Melian Aphroditè.” This is undoubtedly the finest plastic work in the whole of the Louvre. Its beauty is self-evident. It was found in 1820 in the island of Melos in the Greek Archipelago. The statue is usually held to represent the Greek goddess of love, and is a very noble work, yet _not_ one by a recognised master, nor even mentioned by ancient writers among the well-known statues of antiquity. Nothing could better show the incredible wealth of Greek plastic art, indeed, than the fact that this exquisite Aphroditè was produced by a nameless sculptor, and seems to have been far surpassed by many other works of its own period. In type, it belongs to a school which forms a transition between the perfect early grace and purity of Pheidias, with his pupils, and the later, more self-conscious and deliberate style of Praxiteles and his contemporaries. Not quite so pure as the former, it is free from the obvious striving after effect in the latter, and from the slightly affected prettinesses well illustrated here in the group of Silenus with the infant Bacchus. The famous series of Niobe and her Children, in the Uffizi at Florence (duplicates of some elsewhere), exhibits much the same set of characteristics. Those works have been attributed on reasonable grounds to Scopas, a contemporary of Demosthenes: and this statue has therefore been ascribed with little hesitation to one of his pupils. It is, however, purer in form than the Niobe series, and exhibits the perfect ideal, artistic and anatomical, of the beautiful, healthy nude female form for the white race. Its proportions are famous. As regards the missing portions, which have happily _not_ been conjecturally restored, it was originally believed that the left hand held an apple (the symbol of Melos), while the right supported the drapery. It is more probable, however, that the figure was really a Nikè (or Victory) and that she grasped a shield and possibly also a winged figure on an orb. Comparison with the other similar half-draped nude statues described as Venuses in the adjoining rooms is very instructive: their resemblances and differences show the nature of the modifications from previous types, while the immense superiority of this to all the rest is immediately apparent. Notice in particular the exquisite texture of the skin; the perfect moderation of the form, which is well developed and amply covered, without the faintest tinge of voluptuous excess, such as one gets in late work; and the intellectual and moral nobility of the features. No object in the Louvre deserves longer study. It is one of the finest classical works that survive in Europe.