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The Caryatid of the Erechtheion

By Robbie Parkinson . The Caryatid of the Erechtheion. Supposed Origin of the Caryatids .

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The Caryatid of the Erechtheion

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  1. By Robbie Parkinson The Caryatid of the Erechtheion

  2. Supposed Origin of the Caryatids • "...should any one wish for information on the origin of those draped matronal figures crowned with a mutulus and cornice, called Caryatides, he will explain it by the following history. Carya, a city of Peloponnesus, joined the Persians in their war against the Greeks. These in return for the treachery, after having freed themselves by a most glorious victory from the intended Persian yoke, unanimously resolved to levy war against the Caryans. Carya was, in consequence, taken and destroyed, its male population extinguished, and its matrons carried into slavery. That these circumstances might be better remembered, and the nature of the triumph perpetuated, the victors represented them draped, and apparently suffering under the burden with which they were loaded, to expiate the crime of their native city. Thus, in their edifices, did the ancient architects, by the use of these statues, hand down to posterity a memorial of the crime of the Caryans." • Vitruvius, De Architectura (I.1.5)

  3. General information • One of six Caryatids who stood in the Acropolis, Athens, built around 420 BC • Probably held a sacrificial vessel in missing hand • 231 cm tall (very tall) • Carries architectural capital like a basket on her head • I’m pretty sure this is contrapposto

  4. Details of the sculpture • Wears a peplos • Hair braided, falls in a thick rope down her back • Figure strongly resembles women from the east frieze of the Parthenon, which was completed just as work on the Erechtheion began. • From the side, her burden seems to bear down upon her; weight is taken on the right leg, encased in perpendicular folds like the fluting of a column shaft. Asymmetrical. • The left leg is flexed with drapery moulded to it. • Catenaries present between breasts

  5. Woodford says: • “a particularly sensitive appreciation of the beauty of pure pattern can be seen in the back view of... the Erectheum maidens, each of which was slightly different from the others. Here the elaborately styled hair, symmetrically arranged, surmounts the cascade of U-shaped catenary folds described by the cloak. These contrast with the simple vertical pleats of the skirt to produce a design more complex but no less powerful than that of the Berlin goddess a century and a half before.”

  6. You’re welcome!

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