Day 45 - Funerary stele showing little girl


April 18, 2018

This galley (156) also contains a large number of vases, along with marble statues, bronze statuettes, and other objects, mostly from the 5th century B.C.E. I pat myself on the back for immediately recognizing a depiction of Hermes, with his winged sandals and traveler's hat, but am quickly put in my place when the figure I think is Athena turns out to be Apollo. Oh well....

 I admire the vases, but I don't for the most part love them, and I'm trying to figure out why. Partly it may be the subject matter, which often depicts violence -- fights between warriors, violence towards women. (Poseidon was quite the lech, I learn.) But it's also that most of them  don't evoke much feeling of any kind in me.

 This isn't true of today's object, a marble funerary stele some 3 feet high from about 450-400 B.C.E.  Carved in relief against a plain ground, it shows in profile a little girl who is holding to her chest a pet dove, which is crooked against her bent right arm. The bird's head is upturned, and the little girl seems to brush its beak against her lips. How often I have seen Caroline similarly "kissing"  her birds!  The girl holds a second dove in her left hand. It is hard for me to judge the child's age - her hair, indicated by sculpted waves, is quite long, but her pudgy arms, her rounded belly under her skirt, and the large size of her head relative to the rest of her body all suggest that she is very young- maybe four or five. 

 I hear a docent describe the figures shown on another funerary stele as calm and affectless (my term, not hers), but I disagree. It is certainly true that the figures on that stele look calm, but also, to my mind, sorrowful. Grief needn't be expressed in grand emotive gestures, after all. (Or do they only appear sorrowful to me because I know that the scene depicts a deceased individual and his mourners?) To me, though, the downturned, tightly pressed lips of the little girl unmistakably convey sadness.

 And how much sadness the  early death of this sweet and affectionate child must have caused her parents! 

Comments

  1. Jennie TonicDecember 24, 2019 at 2:13 PM

    This was mentioned in the New Yorker (12/2/19, Talk of the Town, Visiting Dignitary)! I thought, "That sounds familiar. Didn't Janet write about that piece?"

    ReplyDelete

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