Lady of Auxerre
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| Lady of Auxerre | |
|---|---|
Ile-de-France, France |
The relatively small (75 cm high)
votary rather than the maiden Goddess Persephone herself, for her right hand touches her solar plexus and her left remains stiffly at her side (Basel 2001). It is also possible that the Kore is a depiction of a deceased individual, possibly in a position of prayer.[1]
Maxime Collignon, a Louvre curator, found the sculpture in a storage vault in the Museum of Auxerre, a city east of Paris, in 1907. No provenance is known, and its mysterious arrival at a provincial French museum gave it a journalistic allure, according to the Louvre monograph.
The
Daedalic." Its secret, knowing and serene hint of a smile is often characterized as the "archaic smile." Sculptures and painted vases exhibiting correlative styles have been found outside Crete as well as in Rhodes, Corinth and Sparta
(Basel 2000).
Excavations in the 1990s by Nikolaos Stampolidis at Eleutherna in Crete have helped establish more precisely a date and place of origin for the Dame d'Auxerre, in the region of Eleutherna and Gortyn, with the recovery from gravesites of very similar carved ivory faces and phallic symbols.
References
- ISBN 9780500288771.
- Jean-Luc Martinez, 2000. La Dame d'Auxerre (Réunion des Musées Nationaux)