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Funerary Stele with a Horseman from Pelinna
Unknown · 4th century BC
A small square of marble, broken across the bottom, holds a burst of action. A horseman gallops to the right on a rearing horse, his cloak streaming out behind him. He wears a cuirass with a fringe of leather straps at the hips and an open faced Illyrian helmet, the type used in the north of Greece. The rider's body twists toward the viewer while the horse plunges forward, and the whole group is squeezed into the frame so that the horse's head almost touches the edge. The carving is low but confident, the work of a local sculptor of the fourth century BC.
The stele comes from Pelinna in Thessaly, the plain of northern Greece famous for its horses and its cavalry, where a man's tomb was very naturally marked by his image as a rider. Horseman stelae of this kind spread through Thessaly and Macedonia in the fourth century and were later adopted throughout the Hellenistic world as an image of the heroised dead. The relief was assigned to the Louvre in 1861, when the museum received the finds of a French mission to Macedonia and Thessaly.
Did You Know? The rider wears an Illyrian helmet, the open faced type favoured in the north, rather than the Corinthian helmet of southern Greece.
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