Found in 1820 on the Aegean island of Milos by a farmer working an old ruin, the statue passed quickly into French hands and into the Louvre. Eager to fill the gap left by Napoleon's loss of the Medici Venus, the museum at first presented this new figure as a masterpiece of the Greek classical period. Modern scholarship dates it differently: the figure is most likely a Late Hellenistic work (c. 130–100 BCE), about three centuries later than the museum initially claimed.

The sculpture is carved from two blocks; an irregular join runs at the hips. The upper body is bare, the lower body wrapped in falling drapery — a contrast Hellenistic sculptors loved, the virtuoso juxtaposition of skin against fabric. The body's S-curve (contrapposto) is a classical inheritance, but the slight twist in the shoulders, the head turned away, and the sense of a motion just paused belong to the theatricality of the Hellenistic age.

What the arms once held has been argued for two centuries. A fragment of an apple found at the site suggests the figure is Aphrodite holding the apple of Paris. Where the missing arms originally fell, however, is still unsettled — and the very fact that the answer is unclear is part of what allowed nineteenth-century Europe to read the Venus de Milo as the 'pure form of antique beauty'.