Found in pieces in 1886
She came out of the ground in three parts. In 1886 excavators on the Acropolis found the lower half of the body in the so-called Korai Pit, a pit where many statues of young women lay buried; a few days later her head turned up nearby, and the upper body a little to the east, north-west of the Erechtheion. The burial was no accident: after the Persians sacked the Acropolis in 480 BCE, the Athenians buried the damaged statues in pits, which is why so many kept their colours.
The statue is attributed, with a question mark, to the sculptor known as the Rampin Master. She is carved in marble from Paros, an island of the Cyclades, and stands 1.2 metres tall, a little smaller than life.
What is she wearing?
Her modern name comes from her dress, the peplos, a heavy rectangle of cloth pinned at the shoulders. Hers is belted at the waist and fastened on the shoulders with bronze pins, whose small holes are still visible. Underneath she wears a longer, finer tunic, a chiton, whose slender folds cover her legs. This combination of a heavy peplos over a light chiton is a good lesson in Greek dress.
What colour was she?
Very colourful. Spectrographic analysis, which identifies pigments from the light they reflect, found that her belt was blue and green, and her chiton blue with a green band at the neck. The peplos itself was white, but its middle was decorated with vertical rows of small animals, birds and riders on red squares, framed by bands of rosettes on a green ground. Its borders carried a double band of spirals, plant motifs and a chain of volutes and palmettes alternating with lotus flowers.
The face was painted too. Her irises and lips are red, while the pupils, eyelids and eyebrows were probably picked out in black. The red that now covers her long curls is only an undercoat: on top of it the hair was painted brown. Standing before the bare marble today, it takes some effort to imagine her the way the Athenians saw her, which is why painted statues have become a field of research of their own.
Metal: earrings, a crown and a spike
Marble was only part of the statue. Small holes in her earlobes show that she wore bronze earrings. On her head, 35 holes held metal rods that supported a crown, a stephane, perhaps of rays of light or of lotus flowers. And from the top of the head rises a stem, the base of a meniskos, a metal disc or spike fixed above the head. Her left hand was carved from a separate piece of marble and fitted into a notch that is still there; whatever she held in that hand is lost.
A girl or a goddess?
Most korai of the Acropolis are read as images of young women offered to Athena, the goddess of the sanctuary. The Peplos Kore has always been the odd one out, and the Acropolis Museum itself notes that her details lead many to think she is no simple kore but a goddess, perhaps Artemis.
The painted copies show how far the answer can move. In 1975 Robert Cook, curator of the Museum of Classical Archaeology in Cambridge, painted a cast of her in a red peplos with white and green borders and a band of squares down the front. Later research, presented in the “Gods in Color” exhibitions, concluded from close study of the painted decoration that she wears the dress of a goddess, probably Artemis; one of the reconstructions even gives her a bow and a wreath of leaves. So is she a goddess? Probably, though no inscription settles it, and the lost left hand, which may have held the decisive attribute, will not come back.
Where to see it
The original is in the Archaic Acropolis Gallery of the Acropolis Museum in Athens, among the other korai found on the rock. Cambridge’s Museum of Classical Archaeology has both a plain and a painted cast, and colour reconstructions travel with the “Gods in Color” exhibitions. Check opening times before you go.
Sources
- Acropolis Museum, Athens, “Statue of a Kore. The ‘Peplos Kore'” (Acr. 679); Archaic Acropolis Gallery, “Dedications”.
- Museum of Classical Archaeology, University of Cambridge, “Peplos Kore” and “Peplos Kore (restored)”.
- Harvard Art Museums, press release for “Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture of Classical Antiquity”.
- Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung, Frankfurt, “Ex-Peploskore (Variant B)”.
