Funerary Stele of Philis
Unknown · c. 450-440 BC
A young woman sits on a stool with a footrest, her feet in sandals, her curling hair bound by a band and a fine hairnet. She wears a thin chiton and a himation and holds an open casket on her knees, with a rolled scroll, a sign of learning or of the letters she leaves behind. The band above carries her name: Philis, daughter of Kleomedes. The relief has been pieced together from eleven fragments, and the upper left corner and part of the legs are modern fills, yet the quiet dignity of the figure is intact.
The stele was carved on the island of Thasos in the northern Aegean around four hundred and fifty to four hundred and forty BC, in the years when the severe style was giving way to the classical. Thasos had its own marble and its own sculptors, and this is one of the finest grave reliefs to survive from the island. It reached the Louvre in 1865, after the French archaeological mission that Emmanuel Miller led on Thasos. Note the calm profile and the heavy, simple folds: the same stillness that the Parthenon sculptors were bringing to Athens at the very same moment.
Did You Know? The stone was reassembled from eleven separate fragments, yet the seated girl reads as a single, unbroken figure.
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