Islands of marble
The Cyclades are some thirty small islands in the middle of the Aegean, plus many islets; the ancient Greeks imagined them as a circle (kyklos) around the sacred island of Delos. They have little farmland, but the Metropolitan Museum of Art lists the resources they do have: copper and iron ores, lead, silver, gold, emery, obsidian and marble, with the marbles of Paros and Naxos among the finest anywhere. People had been carving that stone since the Neolithic, as Neolithic marble figurines from Saliagos, near Paros, show.
Archaeologists split the Early Cycladic period into three phases: I (3200-2800 BCE), II (2700-2400/2300 BCE) and III (2300-2000 BCE), with short transitions in between, according to the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens. Most of the famous figures belong to phase II, which is also named the Keros-Syros culture after two of its burial sites. It sits at the start of the wider Bronze Age Aegean, centuries before the palaces of Crete.
Violins, folded arms and musicians
The earliest figures are schematic, that is, reduced to a sign: the most common type, the “violin”, is a flat body with a neck, rarely taller than 15-20 cm. In phase II comes the type that archaeologists call canonical: a naked woman standing with the arms folded, the left forearm always over the right, the head tilted back, a long nose and no other feature carved on the face. Its varieties are named after the cemeteries where they were first found (Kapsala, Dokathismata, Spedos, Chalandriani, Koumasa). Most are under 60 cm, but a few reach 1.5 m, the size of a short person.
How did the sculptors keep the proportions so steady? The Met notes that figures of the Spedos variety are so consistent in form that they seem to have been planned with a compass. Men are rare. They appear seated, playing the harp or the double flute, and towards the end of phase II as hunters or warriors. The seated harp player in New York, 29 cm high with his instrument, is one of the best preserved.
They were painted
The white marble you see today is only part of the original look. Scientific analysis, the Met reports, has found mineral pigments on the surface: blue from azurite, a copper carbonate, and red from iron ores or cinnabar, a mercury ore. Painters added eyes, hair, necklaces and patterns on cheeks and bodies. A head from Amorgos in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens still shows red decoration on the cheeks. So the blank faces that 20th-century artists admired are, in part, the result of lost paint, a story told in why they look so modern.
Found with the dead
Most figures that archaeologists have excavated themselves came from graves. In phase I the dead were laid in simple cist graves, that is, small boxes lined with stone slabs; in phase II people also dug earth-cut graves with a side entrance, used for several burials. Grave goods varied a great deal from one tomb to another, which the Met reads as a sign of growing social ranking. Some figures also turn up in settlements, so their purpose was probably more varied than “grave goods” suggests.
The largest group found in context comes from Keros, a small island about 10 km south of Naxos. At a place called Kavos, broken figures, stone vessels and pottery were deposited on purpose for about two centuries. One deposit had already been looted; the other, the Special Deposit South, was excavated in 2006-2008 by a team led by Colin Renfrew for the British School at Athens and the University of Cambridge.
Why do most figures have no findspot?
Because they were dug up illegally. The Museum of Cycladic Art states it plainly: most Cycladic figurines have an unknown provenance, since they were unearthed by illicit diggers. Demand grew in the 20th century, when collectors began to prize the figures as art. In 1993 the archaeologists David Gill and Christopher Chippindale documented the effects in the American Journal of Archaeology and called them “calamitous” for archaeology: every figure torn from a grave loses the information about who was buried with it, and when.
The market also made room for fakes. Scholars group many figures by “masters”, sculptors recognised by their style, and Gill later wrote that some of these masters with no secure findspots turned out to be the product of modern workshops.
Where to see it
In Athens, the National Archaeological Museum holds the figures from excavated graves, including the two musicians from Keros and the largest female statue found so far, along with the “frying pans” from Syros. The Museum of Cycladic Art, founded in 1986 around the collection of Nicholas and Dolly Goulandris, shows Cycladic marbles of the third millennium BCE. Outside Greece, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has a collection of Cycladic marbles, including the harp player. Check opening times with each museum before you go.
Sources
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Early Cycladic Art and Culture”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (2004); collection records 68.148 and 47.100.1.
- Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens, “The human form in Cycladic art” and “The Founders”.
- National Archaeological Museum, Athens, “Collection of Cycladic Antiquities” and “Exhibit of the month: frying pan Π4974”.
- Foundation of the Hellenic World, caption of the head NAMA 3909.
- University of Cambridge, Department of Archaeology, “Keros: the Special Deposit South”.
- D. W. J. Gill and C. Chippindale, “Material and intellectual consequences of esteem for Cycladic figures”, American Journal of Archaeology 97.4 (1993), 601-659.
- E. Hendrix, “Painted Ladies of the Early Bronze Age”, Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 55 (1997-98).
