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All auctions / Asian Art / Greek Tanagra Terracotta Kourotrophos, Veiled Woman Holding Child
Eastern Mediterranean, Greece, Hellenistic period, Tanagra. A standing woman wrapped shoulder to ankle in a heavy himation, her body a column of soft vertical folds that break into a diagonal cascade above the spreading plinth. The mold-made buff terracotta has weathered to a matte, sandy surface, softening the features of the veiled head. Cradled in her proper left arm is a small child, its head tucked against her shoulder and one arm lifted and bent at the elbow in what reads as a wave or a reaching gesture. The type belongs to the kourotrophos, the nurturing-figure tradition that runs through Greek votive and domestic terracotta production, and figures of this kind served most often as votive offerings or grave goods, accompanying women and children in sanctuary deposits and tombs alike. The name "Tanagra" comes from the Boeotian town whose cemeteries, plundered in the 1870s, flooded the European market with mold-made terracottas of draped women and set off a collecting craze so fierce that forgers were supplying Paris dealers within a decade. The true Tanagra repertoire favors elegantly mantled women in the fashions of the late 4th and 3rd centuries BCE, once brightly painted over a white slip, with the pigment now almost always lost. Workshops from Boeotia to Asia Minor copied the formula, which is why a figure of this class is best described by style rather than by find-spot. The kourotrophos, literally "child-nurturer," is one of the oldest iconographic formulas in the Greek world, applied to Demeter, Eileithyia, Artemis, and to unnamed mortal mothers alike. Its ambiguity was part of its usefulness: a dedicant could leave such a figure at a sanctuary as a plea for a safe birth, or place it in a grave as a companion. Item # 205019
Estimate:$350
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorAsian Art
Estimate:
$350
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