Vénus d’arles, hôtel païva, paris
This statue, a 19th-century copy of a badly-damaged classical one in the Louvre collection, stands in a niche in a courtyard of a private members’ club on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. Exposed to the weather, the statue had lost a significant amount of carved detail from each hand. A drawing from the Louvre supplied evidence for the missing parts, a ball in one hand and a mirror in the other. I pieced in the mirror as an indent repair, and the missing fingers and ball in the right hand were built up in mortar repairs on armatures.