Funerary Siren
Unknown · Late Hellenistic period, first century BC
A siren, a creature with the head and breast of a woman and the wings and legs of a bird, stands with her wings spread wide. Her right hand is raised to her head and her left is pressed to her breast, the age old gestures of mourning, tearing the hair and beating the chest. Her long hair is painted reddish brown, the wings pink and green, the bird legs red. She is twenty two centimetres high and intact apart from a chip on the right wing. A hole at the top of the back shows she was made to be hung or fixed, and an oval vent in the back allowed the clay to fire safely.
On Greek tombs sirens were not the seductive singers of the Odyssey but mourners, the birds of the soul who lamented the dead, and terracotta versions were placed in graves at Myrina in the first century BC. Several figures from the very same mould survive, showing the workshops turned out these mourners in series. The Louvre's example was excavated by the French School at Athens in the necropolis of Myrina and allotted to the museum in eighteen eighty three.
Did You Know? At least three other sirens from the same mould exist, so this mourner was produced in series for the graves of Myrina.
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