Votive Relief with a Sacrifice to Demeter and Kore
Unknown · 350-300 BC
A family walks toward two goddesses on this votive relief from Eleusis. On the left a veiled woman and a man in a cloak raise their hands in prayer, while a servant in a short workman's tunic carries a tray and leads a pig toward a rectangular altar. Beyond it stand Kore, holding ears of wheat and a double torch, and her mother Demeter, in a peplos, raising her left arm and holding out a shallow bowl with a boss in the centre. A hole shows where a metal sceptre once fitted into Demeter's hand. The heads were missing when the relief was found and were replaced in an early restoration.
The pig was the standard offering to Demeter, and the family here is doing exactly what pilgrims did at the sanctuary of Eleusis, home of the Mysteries that promised a better afterlife. Carved in the second half of the fourth century BC, the relief was found at Eleusis itself and was bought by the Louvre in 1865. It is in two fragments joined together. Compare the small worshippers with the taller goddesses: Greek sculptors used size to mark the gap between mortals and immortals.
Did You Know? None of the heads is ancient: all were missing when the relief was found and were carved anew by an early restorer.
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