Lady of Auxerre

Look closely at the dress. Its surface is engraved with a meander border, concentric squares and a pattern of scales, and traces of red paint survive on the chest; when new, the figure was brightly coloured. The style is called Daedalic, after the mythical craftsman Daedalus, and it belongs to the seventh century BC, when Greek sculptors were absorbing lessons from Egypt and the Near East. The frontal pose, the wig-like hair and the flat, geometric treatment of the body are its signatures. The limestone and the style point to Crete, and probably to the city of Eleutherna, where comparable fragments have been found.

The statuette owes its name to an odd rediscovery. In 1907 a curator noticed it in a storeroom of the museum of Auxerre in Burgundy, where it had been sitting, unrecorded and unexplained, after passing through the hands of a local collector. How it had travelled from Crete to a provincial French town was never established. The Louvre obtained it by exchange in 1909, and it quickly became one of the touchstones of early Greek art, the earliest large-scale female figure in the collection and a rare survivor from the century before the marble kouroi and korai of the Archaic period.

Did You Know? The statue was found by accident in 1907 in the basement storeroom of a small museum in Burgundy, with no record of how it got there.