The Venus de Milo was discovered in the Spring of 1820 on the island of Melos, and was soon afterwards acquired by the Marquis de Rivière. He presented the statue to King Louis XVIII, who in turn gave it to the Louvre, which had just been forced to return the Venus de Medici to Florence. It was therefore no surprise that the French instantly viewed their new acquisition as a superior work to the one they had lost.
However there was a cast of the Venus de Milo in the Berlin Academy just two years later. Furthermore though, another cast of the work was shown in the Greek Court of the Great Exhibition of 1851 along with the Discobolus, the Laocoon and the Barberini Faun, the four works being upheld as unrivalled examples of Classical sculpture- suggesting that even in Britain the work was accepted as a masterpiece.