Statuette of a Woman Holding Her Breasts
Unknown · Achaemenid period, 539-330 BC
A slim woman stands with both hands raised beneath her breasts, dressed in a long garment with sleeves in the Persian fashion. She is carved from the radius bone of a horse, and the shaft of the bone dictates her narrow, columnar shape, less than twenty-two centimetres tall. The face is simplified, the hair falls in a mass behind the shoulders, and the surface has taken on the warm patina of handled bone. The lower part is incomplete. Look at how the folds of the sleeves are indicated by shallow grooves.
The gesture of the hands under the breasts is one of the oldest in Near Eastern art, used for goddesses and votive figures of fertility from the Bronze Age onward. Here it is combined with the dress of the Persian empire, which ruled Phoenicia from the sixth to the fourth century before Christ, a neat example of an old religious image in new clothes. The figurine is thought to come from Phoenicia or the Syro-Lebanese region and entered the Louvre as a gift.
Did You Know? The carver used the natural curve of a horse's forearm bone, so the figure is as slender as the bone it was cut from.
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