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Statue of a Wounded Amazon
Marble, Roman, Imperial period, first or second century A.D.
Copy of a Greek bronze statue of ca. 450-425 B.C.
Gift of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., 1932 (32.11.4)
Mary and Michael Jaharis Gallery
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The Amazons were a race of formidable warrior women, noted for their skills in archery and horsemanship. In mythology, the heroes Theseus and Achilles both fought and fell in love with Amazons. This figure is, like their adversaries, a noble and beautiful enemy. She is graceful and composed, leaning lightly on a pillar. Her face shows no sign of emotion, and her tidy hair no evidence of the exertion of battle. The short garment she wears is typical of male horsemen and soldiers, but hers is in disarray, unfastened from her left shoulder, and baring both her breasts. She raises her right arm to rest it on her head in a gesture associated in Greek art with sleeping and dying. Below her right armpit, blood spurts from a wound.
Other subtle details hint at the violence she has known. Stripped of both her horse and her proper belt, she wears a broken bridle around her waist. In mythology, the Amazon Hippolyte lost her belt to Herakles; this could be Hippolyte. A lost belt usually means lost chastity in Greek mythology, and scholars have suggested that the Amazon has been raped as well as wounded.
Like many of the other works in this gallery, the Amazon is an ancient Roman version of an earlier Greek statue. The Roman writer Pliny describes a contest between five famous sculptors who competed to make the best Amazon in the fifth century B.C. This statue probably reproduces one of the Amazons they created for that contest.
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