The Lady of Auxerre
By STAN PARCHIN
July 22, 2010
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| Cretan (ca. 640-630 B.C.). The Lady of Auxerre. Limestone. H. 75 cm (29.5 in.). Musée du Louvre. |
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| Cretan (640-630 B.C.). The Lady of Auxerre (back view). Limestone. H. 75 cm (29.5 in.). Musée du Louvre. |
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| Cretan (640-630 B.C.). The Lady of Auxerre (detail: face). Limestone. H. 75 cm (29.5 in.). Musée du Louvre. |
The Musée du Louvre's female statuette known as The Lady of Auxerre (ca. 640-630 B.C.) is a masterpiece of early Greek art. The yellowish limestone work likely comes from the site of Eleutherna in western Crete, where objects of similar manufacture, including a statue fragment and faces made from ivory, have recently surfaced at the necropolis (cemetery) of Orthi Petra. Carved in the strong and vigorous Daedalic Style (named after Daedalus, the mythical architect, master craftsman and engineer of the island's legendary King Minos), the sculpture is the precursor of Greek Archaic marble statuary of the 6th Century B.C., namely the votive kore.
Appearance and Condition
Slightly less than half life-size and standing upright on a plinth (square base), the statuette is monumental in appearance. The fragile nature of the limestone from which it was carved may account for the missing left part of its face, surface abrasions and chips. The sculpture's finely modeled torso and contrasting tubular lower section are separated by a high narrow waist cinched with a wide belt. The subject's heavy tresses of hair, divided on the shoulders, conceal her ears. Beneath the sinuous shawl that drapes her shoulders and arms, she wears a bodice, its collar decorated with a key pattern. The front of her peplos, a simple long woolen garment, is incised with a vertical band of interlocking rectangles that accentuates the work's angularity.
Foreign Influences and Innovation
Crete in the Aegean Sea was situated along various trade routes that linked the ancient Near East with Greece, making the exchange of artistic ideas among neighboring civilizations possible. The Greeks were known for borrowing foreign concepts and adapting them for their own purposes. The Lady of Auxerre's gesture with her right hand and hair resembling a stepped wig were derived from nude representations of Syrian and Phoenician goddesses. Her heavy belt was probably taken from female images as far away as Phrygia and Urartu.
Daedalic sculpture is usually rigidly symmetrical, with the female figure's arms both flat against its sides or bent at the elbows, its hands cupping the full breasts. The artist responsible for The Lady of Auxerre daringly broke with the accepted canon. The subject is portrayed with her left hand flat against her thigh and the right one pressed against her chest below the bosom, suggesting movement.
Provenance
The provenance or ownership history of The Lady of Auxerre is fascinating and unusual. In brief, the French sculptor Edouard Bourgoin probably acquired the statuette in Paris and then moved it to his country home in Burgundy. No one purchased the sculpture at the public sale of the artist's possessions following his death in 1895. So the auctioneer's crier, also the concierge of the town theater at Auxerre, paid one franc for it and moved the antiquity there, where it was used as a stage prop. After the owner retired the work to an old case, it was discovered by an unknown person who brought it to the Musée d'Auxerre, where it stood in the building's entrance hall as a hat stand. Maxime Collignon (1849-1917), a professor at Paris' Sorbonne who was studying the earliest examples of recently discovered ancient Cretan sculptures, recognized the work's importance. The Lady of Auxerre returned to Paris in 1907, where the Musée du Louvre exchanged a painting for it two years later.
Sources
Lemaistre, Isabelle Leroy-Jay, David Brenneman, et al. The Louvre and the Masterpiece (exh. cat.). Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 2008, 146-149.
Von Bothmer, Dietrich and Joan R. Mertens. Greek Art of the Aegean Islands (exh. cat.). New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1979, 129-130, 134-135.