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 at ...