Eros Playing the Kithara
Unknown · Late Hellenistic period, c. 25 BC-1 AD
A winged Eros stands on a base, half wrapped in a cloak that leaves his chest bare, sandals tied on his feet and a thick wreath of ivy leaves and berries on his head, with long ribbons hanging from it. He holds a plectrum in one hand and rests his kithara, the large concert lyre, on the top of a short column. The clay is an orange bistre, and the colours are unusually well preserved: pink on the cloak, the sandals and the ribbons, traces of blue on the column and green on the base. The wreath and ribbons were added separately to the moulded figure, and a round vent hole was cut in the back for firing.
Eros as a musician, crowned with the ivy of Dionysos, was a favourite of the Myrina workshops in the late first century BC, when the god of love had become a graceful, boyish companion for the dead. This figurine was excavated in the necropolis of Myrina by the French School at Athens and came to the Louvre in eighteen eighty three, in the great share of finds that made the museum's Myrina collection the richest in the world.
Did You Know? Look for the pink on the cloak and the blue on the column: the figure keeps more of its original paint than most terracottas from Myrina.
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