Most of the Cycladic figures on display in the Museum are female, without attributes. This figure is different, a man sitting on a chair, holding a harp-like instrument to accompany himself as he sings. Painted details originally embellished the figure and others like him, but even reduced to plain white marble he remains legible and engaging. Indeed, the pronounced abstraction of these figures, their simplification into elegant wedge-shapes, is what so appeals to our modern sensibility.
The figure tilts back his head, draws his lips forward, and makes us think of the words he must be singing; his prominent ears allow him to hear the song he sings. The muscles of the arms and the carefully articulated fingers suggest this man's power as a musician; he releases his right thumb, perhaps to sound a note on a string.
Looking at this harp-player from the third millennium B.C. makes one think of Homer, the great poet who immortalized the epic tales in the Iliad and the Odyssey. In an age before writing, poets composed their works orally, performed them aloud to music, and so preserved the memory of heroic men and women and great events in the mythic past. Some twenty centuries before Homer, perhaps this harp-player also taught wisdom and history to his people, singing to them through long evenings while they sat around him.
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