The Caryatids of the Erechtheion
About 421 to 406 BC
Five tall young women in fine pleated dresses stand on a raised balcony, each carrying a heavy cushion on her head. They are the Caryatids, the marble maidens who for two and a half thousand years held up the roof of the south porch of the Erechtheion, the temple on the north side of the Acropolis that housed the oldest cult of Athena. On the rock today, the porch is carried by copies. The originals were moved indoors in 1979 to escape the acid rain that was dissolving their faces, and they came to this museum when it opened. The sixth position on the balcony is empty. That figure was removed by Lord Elgin's agents in 1801 and is in the British Museum in London.
Look at how the sculptor solved the problem of making a human body carry a roof. Each maiden stands with one leg straight and locked, its vertical folds of drapery working like the fluting of a column, and the other leg relaxed and bent beneath thin, clinging cloth. The three on the left rest their weight on the right leg and the three on the right on the left leg, so the group reads as a mirrored pair around the centre. The thick braided hair falling down the back is not only decoration; it strengthens the narrow neck, which would otherwise be the weakest point under the load.
Between 2011 and 2014 the museum cleaned the figures in full view of visitors, using lasers that removed centuries of soot without touching the surviving surface of the marble, and it received an international conservation award for the work. Walk all the way round the balcony. From the back you see the hair and the shoulder straps that no one standing on the Acropolis could ever have seen, and from the front, through the glass, you can look up at the porch on the rock where their copies still stand.
Did You Know? The museum lasered the Caryatids clean in public between 2011 and 2014, with visitors watching the conservators at work.
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