Plaque Figurine of a Woman Holding Her Breasts (AO 29628)
Unknown · Seventh to sixth century BC
A small terracotta plaque, under seven centimetres high, pressed from a mould and showing a woman who holds her breasts in her hands. She wears a rounded, ribbed headdress, a pectoral on her chest and bracelets on each arm, and her hair falls in two twisted locks framing the face. Look at the crispness of the mould: the jewellery and the ribbing of the cap are all rendered in relief, and the surface was smoothed and coated with a slip before firing. The lower part of the figure is missing.
The figurine belongs to a group of three in this case, all acquired by the Louvre in nineteen eighty-nine and attributed on grounds of style to the region of Aleppo in northern Syria. The museum dates this one to the seventh or sixth century BC. The gesture of a woman supporting her breasts is one of the oldest in Near Eastern art, an image of nourishment and fertility that had been made in clay for two thousand years by the time this plaque was moulded. Cheap and easily carried, such figurines were kept in houses and placed in graves, the humblest but most widespread religious images of Iron Age Syria.
Did You Know? Mould-made plaques like this were the mass-produced devotional images of their day, turned out by the hundred from a single mould.
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