The Giustiniani Stele: Classical beauty incarnate

Depicted on a tall panel that narrows slightly towards the top is a young woman dressed in a long tunic, open at the side and folded over at the top. This peplos of heavy wool is fastened at the right shoulder with a clasp that was originally inlaid in bronze. The hair is gathered at the back, and held in place by a broad fillet wound several times around the head. The ears were once adorned with ear-rings, also of bronze. The girl looks down at a round box in her left hand, whose lid lies on the floor in front of her, taking out of it with the right a piece of jewellery that would have been painted, or perhaps incense for an offering. Crowning the stele is an impressive palmette rising from the cusp of two volutes, which emerge in turn from an acanthus calyx. An atmosphere of quiet grief and melancholy dominates the scene, referring to the premature death of the person represented. The manner of the relief and the sculptural style, with its soft and weighty rendering of the fabric and the luxurious vegetal growth of the ornamental finial, suggest that this stele, certainly one of the most beautiful of Greek funerary monuments to a young woman, was the work of a sculptor on the island of Paros, in the Cyclades, around 460 BCE.