Marble female figure

Technical analysis: Multiband imaging, raking light examination, X-ray radiography, optical microscopy, Raman spectroscopy


This reclining intersex figure is largely complete except for minor losses at the tip of the right shoulder, top of the right breast, and ends of the four toes of the left foot. The latter is apparently recent. A break at the neckline has been mended. The spade-shaped head is tilted back with a pointed chin, broad rounded crown and a prominent nose in high relief. A tall, thick, cylindrical neck rests upon a pair of squared, angular shoulders with two thin projecting upper arms bent at right angles. Deep horizontal incisions describe four hands with three incised fingers each below the small, uneven rounded breasts. There is no indication of a belly, rather the multiple forearms are stacked above a penis rendered by a thin shallow groove.(1) A deep vertical groove delineates co-joined legs and feet with ten toes indicated by short incisions.


The figure is carved from white marble with a gray cast on back. It is very similar in style and proportion to a female figure is Berlin, which Getz-Preziosi notes is said to be from Seriphos and is “carved in an unusual blue-grey marble,” and is “most probably the work of an untutored person living outside the sculptural mainstream.”(2) This is very likely the work of the same sculptor.


Buff-colored burial accretions, some in the form of rootlets, are visible at the left elbow, leg and foot. Traces of red pigment under the chin and in the recesses of the forearms consist of an assemblage of very fine particles of different colors, including red, blue and black. These particles have been identified as carbon-based black, hematite, and other synthetic red and blue pigments, and are likely associated with the filling present at the center of the figure.


Sandy MacGillivray, Dorothy Abramitis, Federico Carò, and Linda Borsch


(1) For Early Cycladic male and intersex figures, see Getz-Preziosi, Pat. 1980. ‘The Male Figure in Early Cycladic Sculpture.” Metropolitan Museum Journal, 15:, pp. 5-33.


(2) Thimme, Jürgen, ed. 1977. Art and Culture of the Cyclades: Handbook of an Ancient Civilisation. pp, 490-91, no. 244, Karlsruhe: C. F. Müller; Getz-Preziosi, Pat. 1994. Early Cycladic Sculpture: An Introduction. Rev. ed. p. 52, fig. 22c, Malibu: Getty Museum.