The relatively small (75 cm high) limestone Cretan sculpture called the Lady of Auxerre at the Louvre Museum in Paris depicts an archaic Greek goddess of c. 650 – 625 BC. It is a Kore (“maiden”), perhaps a votary rather than the maiden goddess Persephone herself, for her right hand touches her solar plexus and her left remains stiffly at her side.
It is also possible that the Kore is a depiction of a deceased individual, possibly in a position of prayer.
A Louvre curator found the sculpture in a storage vault in the Museum of Auxerre, a city east of Paris, in 1907.
Excavations in the 1990s by Nikolaos Stampolidis in Crete have helped establish more precisely a date and place of origin for the Lady of Auxerre, in the region of Eleutherna and Gortyna, with the recovery from gravesites of very similar carved ivory faces and other objects.
Cast of the Lady of Auxerre sculpture,
with putative colour reconstructed,
at the Museum of Classical Archaeology,
Cambridge
Ετικέτες: Αρχαιότητα, Γαλλία, γλυπτική, Ελλάδα, Κρήτη