The Exaltation of the Flower
Unknown · c. 470-460 BC
Two women face each other in profile, so close that their hands almost meet in the centre of the slab. Each wears a peplos, the heavy woollen dress of early classical Greece, and a cloth cap that gathers the hair at the back of the head. Both raise a flower in delicate fingers, and one seems to hold a small bag or seeds. The gesture gave the relief its modern name, the Exaltation of the Flower, and the pair are often taken for Demeter and her daughter Kore, the goddesses of grain, though they may simply be two women in a funerary scene. The top edge and the lower part of the stele are lost, and the back is carefully dressed, so the slab was meant to be seen against a wall.
The relief was carved around 470 to 460 in Thessaly, at Pharsalus, and it belongs to the severe style, the brief moment between archaic stiffness and classical ease: notice the heavy eyelids, the calm mouths and the large, simplified hands. It came to the Louvre in 1861, after the archaeologist Léon Heuzey's exploration of northern Greece, and remains one of the finest Greek reliefs in the museum.
Did You Know? The women were carved before the Parthenon was begun, at the very moment Greek sculpture learned to show calm emotion.
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