Female figure, Chalandriani type

This figure belongs to a category of stone sculpture made during the third millennium B.C. on a group of Aegean islands known as the Cyclades, home to an extremely fine grade of white marble still quarried today. While related small-scale representations of human subjects were made by other early cultures of the Mediterranean and the Near East, the Cycladic series is unusually ambitious, featuring images in a broad array of formats and at scales ranging from minuscule to nearly life-size. Although the abstractness of their appearance often prompts comparison with twentieth-century art, these Bronze Age works manifest a fascination with the proportions of the human body that connects them on a conceptual level with the more naturalistic tendencies of later Greek sculpture.Cycladic figures are always nude, and most (though not all) are female. This figure, with its sculpturally rendered breasts and incised pubic triangle, belongs to a canonical type; its primary characteristics are a backward-tilted head, a cylindrical neck, pointed shoulders, arms folded above the pelvic area, and legs pressed together with downward-flexed feet fringed by carefully notched toes. While the protruding nose is the only sculpturally rendered feature of the face, some figures preserve the remnants of painted details such as eyes, mouths, hair, and occasionally tattooed designs. Such figures, when their context is known, have usually been found deposited in tombs. It is uncertain whether they were made specifically for burial or whether, as some evidence suggests, they were used as cult objects by the living before being placed in graves. Their significance, too, is a matter of conjecture; they may have functioned as protective divinities or symbolic doubles, consorts or servants of the deceased.