Picture the most famous arms in the history of art, and then remember that they do not exist. The Venus de Milo is recognized from countless gift shops and parodies, but this episode reveals that her fame is equally the product of a chaotic 19th-century scramble on an Ottoman island, cutthroat museum politics and an academic cover-up driven by French nationalism after Napoleon’s defeat.

We start in April 1820 with the farmer Yorgos Kentrotas breaching an underground niche, the French naval officer Voutier urging him to keep digging, and the last-second intervention by the Comte de Marcellus that pulled the statue off an Ottoman-bound ship. We examine her damaged state on arrival at the Louvre, the metal tenon hole proving she once had an extended arm, her unfinished back, the argument by Quatremere de Quincy that stopped fake limbs being attached, and the inscribed base naming Alexandros of Antioch that dated her to the Hellenistic period and then mysteriously went missing. We cover Furtwangler’s stylistic analysis, the apple theory confirmed by 2010 isotopic testing, the shield-mirror theory, her wartime evacuations, the 1964 Japan tour, Magritte and Dali, cornflake and denim ads, and the Photoplay comparison to Joan Crawford.

• Herms, a gymnasiarch inscription and what they reveal about where she originally stood
• Why leaving her broken made her iconic, through the lens of gestalt psychology
• How a depleted post-Waterloo Louvre needed a classical masterpiece and suppressed the evidence
• A classical face grafted onto a twisting Hellenistic body: the stylistic mashup experts ignored
• The reminder that Greek marble was painted in loud colors and adorned with metal jewelry