A new 3D reconstruction suggests that Venus was a textile-spinning prostitute. But never mind these unprovable claims, the more interesting question is why does this beautiful but broken sculpture still fascinate?

Why we're still up in arms about the mystery of the Venus de Milo

There are multiple theories about the Venus de Milo, the ancient Greek statue famous for its immaculate beauty and lack of arms. Many suggestions about how those missing limbs were once positioned and what Venus was doing with them have been advanced since this elegant antiquity was discovered in 1820 on the Aegean island of Milos.

Was she holding a spear? Or looking in a handheld mirror? Archeology professor and textiles expert Elizabeth Wayland Barber suggested that Venus was spinning, and suggests the statue may represent a prostitute, as spinning was an activity associated with ancient Greek sex workers.

It is impossible to prove this or any other theory about the absent arms of the Venus de Milo. Cartoonists who depict her weightlifting have as much credibility. A new 3D reconstruction showing how Venus might look as a spinner just adds a techno gloss, rather than any evidence. There are many images of hetaira – as courtesans were called - in Greek art but a marble statue on this scale seems much more likely to be the goddess of love than a professional lover.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Accidental surrealist masterpiece: the Venus de Milo at the Louvre, Paris. Photograph: Paul Cooper/Rex Features

The interesting question is why we want to talk about the arms at all. Why, two centuries after its discovery, does this sculpture still fascinate?

The Venus de Milo is an accidental surrealist masterpiece. Her lack of arms makes her strange and dreamlike. She is perfect but imperfect, beautiful but broken – the body as a ruin. That sense of enigmatic incompleteness has transformed an ancient work of art into a modern one. In 1936, Salvador Dali made a copy of the Venus de Milo with drawers inserted in it, so it could be used as a piece of furniture. Dali saw the armless Greek goddess as a ready-made surrealist object straight out of a dream.

This statue embodies – literally - the modern world’s ambivalence towards classical beauty. In the 18th century, aristocrats and artists took their Grand Tours to Rome to revere the Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican Museum. That boring masterpiece has both its arms and is perfect in every way. It was admired two hundred years ago as an image of the absolute rational clarity of Greek civilisation and the perfect harmony of divine beauty. All that bores us stiff nowadays. Who wants perfection? Who worships straight-lined classical reason?

The armless Venus de Milo entered European culture in the 19th century just as artists and writers were rejecting the perfect and timeless. The classical world was imagined as an eerie sepulchre of beauty in Arnold Bocklin’s painting The Isle of the Dead. Greek myths became images of the psyche in Sigmund Freud’s interpretations of dreams. After the first world war, the dadaists and surrealists chopped up images of statues in such works as Max Ernst’s collage novel The Hundred Headless Woman.

The accidents of archeology have turned this ancient statue into a masterpiece of the uncanny. Who cares what her arms were doing? It is their absence that makes the Venus de Milo a modern enigma.