Dancing maidens decorate a column

Greek stone sculptures in larger formats were always originally used in an architectural context, unless they were made specifically as votive offerings or for tombs. With this knowledge, we can deduce the original use of the relief portrait of a woman shown here: it originally formed part of column drum that had a diameter of over 1 m. On the outer left of the fragment we can see a vertical ridge that matches one to the right of the head. (In the counterpart to this piece, meanwhile, only the head has survived and nothing of the body.) These two heads, with their Archaic smiles, were placed as significant decoration in front of the 10 cm wide cannelures of the column. They represent women in ceremonial costume: tightly fitting robes and fine veils, held in place on the head by two peculiar thick hoops. Other details were originally painted on and are now lost. These women must have belonged to the cult of Apollo in Didyma, where the columns stood in the antechamber of the famous temple of Apollo, until the Persians razed it, and the neighbouring Ionian city of Miletus, to the ground in 494 BCE, as retribution for the Ionian insurrection. This beautiful fragment, with its smooth, expansive forms and concisely chiselled, angular details, is indicative of Miletian art of the late Archaic period.