Small Relief of the Three Graces
Unknown · 2nd century AD
Three naked young women embrace, two facing us and the one in the centre turned away, on a small marble panel forty centimetres high. Their heads and feet are lost, and the edges have been recut, perhaps so that the slab could be set into a wall. Chips mar the right arm of the left figure, the leg of the central one and the arm of the right one, and one knee has been filled. What survives is the rhythm: three bodies swaying together, arms on shoulders, a composition so balanced that it was repeated for two thousand years.
The Graces, or Charites, were the companions of Aphrodite, givers of beauty and charm, and the three intertwined nudes appeared in the Hellenistic period and became a favourite in Roman art, from marble groups to wall paintings and coins. The relief was carved in the second century AD, probably in Italy, and was given to the Louvre in 1878. A full size statue group of the same subject, restored in the seventeenth century, stands in the same hall, so you can compare the miniature version with the monumental one and see how the pattern hardly changed.
Did You Know? The same three figure pose was still being copied by Raphael and Canova, some fifteen hundred years after this small panel was carved.
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