Ancient Greek Art: Berlin Standing Goddess

It's time to move on to the female statues on our syllabus now and this one is the oldest one with a date of 570 to 560 BC and she's known as the Berlin standing goddess. Berlin because of the museum she's in today, the Altes Museum in Berlin and goddess because there is some speculation that she might be a representation of Demeter or Persephone or in some way associated with the worship of these two figures and that is because she holds a pomegranate in her hand which is of course a symbol of Persephone but also because of the hat she wears. Now this is known as a polos hat and could be associated in the ancient world with priestesses of Demeter and Persephone and the Eleusinian mysteries. It's also possible however that because this statue is a grave marker the pomegranate is simply a symbol of the afterlife. If this is the case then we would be looking at an aristocratic woman and there certainly is evidence to support this theory. So for example she's incredibly well accessorized, she's wearing a choker around her neck if you look very closely, there are conical earrings hanging from her earlobes, she's even wearing platform sandals. On top of this is a really interesting fact about how this statue was discovered. So she's from the region Attica but she was found buried and wrapped in lead sheeting to protect the statue. Now that could be possibly because of her aristocratic appearance. In the period later years, the decades on from her being made, Athens was moving towards a democracy and statues like this were more symbolic of that earlier period, the time when Athens was ruled by the aristocratic families and so this might have been a reason why a family wished to protect her and hide her. From an artistic point of view you can see that like the male coroi, the marble has restricted the pose the sculptor is able to put the statue in. So she's in a very rigid pose with her feet close together, her arms attached to the body. Now one mistake students often make is to talk about the female statues and say they're in the sentry box pose but of course if you actually look at them they're not, you know there's not one foot forward, there's not arms down by the sides, fists clenched. So try and avoid referring to them in that way, just mentioning that rigid pose and describing it is more than adequate. On top of this you'll notice the body is mostly concealed by the drapery, we can hardly see a feminine form at all from the front of the statue and in fact you have to go behind to see any kind of swell of the hips at all. As well as concealing the body the drapery also serves other purposes, so it acts as a support for the marble statue itself, you can see the bottom half of the statue is rather blocky and the sculptor has been able to avoid sculpting the legs themselves. But it also creates pattern, so this statue is wearing a chiton with a hymation cloak over the top and we get those columnar folds on the bottom half and the catenary folds on the back of this statue as the drapery kind of folds around the back, a really nice contrast to one another. The other thing worth pointing out is because we're in this archaic period she's also got some similar features to the coroic, she's got that braided hair, the bulgy eyes, the exaggerated facial features are there and so is the archaic smile.