19th Marble Pair of Sculptures of Caryatids Italian

View Similar Items

Pair of Marble Columns, Italy, Late 19th Century

Antique White Carrara Marble Fireplace, Carved Caryatids, 19th Century Italy

American Egyptian Revival Carved Wood Pair of Pharaoh Caryatids

Pair of 17th/ 18th Century Italian White Marble Baroque Ornaments

Art Nouveau Italian Marble Sculpture

A Fine & Large 19th Century Grand Tour Serpentine Marble Socle, Italy Circa 1800

Pair of Italian 19th Century Carved Fruit and Foliage Fragments on Lucite Bases

19th Century Matched Pair of Recumbent Carved Mahogany Lions

19th Century Italian Carved Marble Architectural Frieze Sculpture of Caesar

Pair Of Marble Fonts - 19th Century

Italian 15th Century Marble Fragment

Exquisite Pair of 19th Century Hand Carved Hindu Temple Struts, South India

1 of 7

19th Marble Pair of Sculptures of Caryatids Italian

About the Item

A pair of superlative italian caryatids carved in white marbles; the caryatid is female figure serving as an architectural support taking the place of a column or a pillar supporting an entablature on her head. The Greek term karyatides literally means "maidens of Karyai", an ancient town of Peloponnese. Karyai had a famous temple dedicated to the goddess Artemis in her aspect of Artemis Karyatis: "As Karyatis she rejoiced in the dances of the nut-tree village of Karyai, those Karyatides, who in their ecstatic round-dance carried on their heads baskets of live reeds, as if they were dancing plants; some of the earliest known examples were found in the treasuries of Delphi, dating to about the 6th century BC, but their use as supports in the form of women can be traced back even earlier, to ritual basins, ivory mirror handles from Phoenicia, and draped figures from archaic Greece. The best-known and most-copied examples are those of the six figures of the Caryatid Porch of the Erechtheion on the Acropolis at Athens. One of those original six figures, removed by Lord Elgin in the early 19th century, is now in the British Museum in London. The Acropolis Museum holds the other five figures, which are replaced onsite by replicas. The five originals that are in Athens are now being exhibited in the new Acropolis Museum, on a special balcony that allows visitors to view them from all sides. The Romans also copied the Erechtheion caryatids, installing copies in the Forum of Augustus and the Pantheon in Rome, and at Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli. Another Roman example, found on the Via Appia, is the Townley Caryatid. In Early Modern times, the practice of integrating caryatids into building facades was revived and in interiors they began to be employed in fireplaces, which had not been a feature of buildings in Antiquity and offered no precedents. Early interior examples are the figures of Hercules and Iole carved on the jambs of a monumental fireplace in the Sala della Jole of the Doge's Palace, Venice, about 1450; in the following century Jacopo Sansovino, both sculptor and architect, carved a pair of female figures supporting the shelf of a marble chimneypiece at Villa Garzoni, near Padua. In the 16th century, from the examples engraved for Sebastiano Serlio's treatise on architecture, caryatids became a fixture in the decorative vocabulary of Northern Mannerism expressed by the Fontainebleau School and the engravers of designs in Antwerp. In the early 17th century, interior examples appear in Jacobean interiors in England; in Scotland the overmantel in the great hall of Muchalls Castle remains an early example. Caryatids remained part of the German Baroque vocabularyand were refashioned in more restrained and "Grecian" forms by neoclassical architects and designers, such as the four terracotta caryatids on the porch of St Pancras New Church, London. Late Baroque caryatid and atlantid hemi-figures at Sanssouci, Frederick the Great's schloss at Potsdam Many caryatids lined up on the facade of the 1893 Palace of the Arts housing the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. In the arts of design, the draped figure supporting an acanthus-grown basket capital taking the form of a candlestick or a table-support is a familiar cliché of neoclassical decorative arts. The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota has caryatids as a motif on its eastern facade. In 1905 American sculptor Augustus Saint Gaudens created a caryatid porch for the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York in which four of the eight figures (the other four figures holding only wreaths) represented a different art form, Architecture, Painting, Sculpture, and Music .

Dimensions:
Height: 74.81 in (190 cm)Width: 19.69 in (50 cm)Depth: 15.75 in (40 cm)
Sold As:
Set of 2
Style:
Classical Greek (In the Style Of)
Materials and Techniques:
Statuary Marble,Hand-Carved
Place of Origin:
Italy
Period:
19th Century
Date of Manufacture:
19th Century
Condition:
Minor losses.
Seller Location:
Roma, IT
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU243339132301