This week, we just had one off-campus visit as a class: The Museum of Cycladic Art. We were given a lovely tour of one of the leading collections of Cycladic art in the world, by one of the leading curator-archaeologists in the field.
Our tour began on the first floor, which housed the permanent exhibition of artifacts from the 3rd millennium BC. The bulk of this exhibition was made up of marble figurines, marble and clay vases, bronze tools, and of course the ‘frying pans,’ which are earthenware skillet-shaped goods of unknown purpose, outfitted with geometrical motifs and the occasional oared longboat. Although I found all of these types of pieces extremely fascinating and elegant, I would like to focus on the marble figurines for the purpose of this blog post, and more specifically, the ones that were pointed out to us as being female figures.
Female Cycladic figurines from the Early Bronze Age (3300–1200 BCE) exhibit key characteristics that make them identifiable as females, including the pubic triangle, breasts, and hip curvature, as well as what could be interpreted as a “baby-bump” on some of the female figurines (albeit very small ones). Like most of the figurines from the Cyclades, a group of islands in the South Aegean Sea between present-day Greece and Turkey, the figurines are made out of marble, a material that was available in large quantities on the islands of Naxos, Keros, Paros, and Ios. The figurines are curious and enigmatic in and of themselves: the use is still debated by scholars, although many of them are found in graves, which highly suggests a religious significance to these figurines. One point that our guide was adamant about was the fact that much of the information about Early Cycladic culture was lost due to the extensive looting that took place at the site during the 1950s and 1960s. During my time working on an archaeological dig in northern Greece last summer, I learned the absolute necessity of excavating finds in their proper archaeological context. With each thin layer of dirt that we systematically peeled back from the trenches, we had to meticulously record the weight, number, and types of pottery sherds (and other finds) found in that context. Anything that was found lying on the side of a trench or the surrounding area was all but doomed to exist in archaeological and historical oblivion, a scenario that the trench supervisors referred to as a tragedy. Thus, looting not only us not only of accurate recordings of history from the pieces removed from the site, but also disturbs the context of the little that is left. Despite the extensive looting, archaeologists were still able to find two large deposits of purposefully broken figurines, at Dhaskalio-Kavos, at a possible religious sanctuary site. Nonetheless, what the museum has been able to salvage was awe-inspiring. The figures were extremely uniform and their surfaces smooth, and given that they were made out of marble, which is a stone (albeit a relatively soft one), the amount of carving and precision that must have gone into these figures is astonishing to me. I had never seen such early forms of ‘art’, and I somehow felt incredibly human, standing before such elegant figures from a culture and time period that I feel so far removed from in my daily life.
The most interesting thing to me about the figurines was the fact that there are far more female figurines than male ones. In my limited experience with and knowledge of art history, it seems that women and men are depicted at roughly comparable levels in art. So what are some possible reasons for such a significant skew toward women in the case of Cycladic figurines? I believe there could be many, but I have toyed with a few in particular. What came to mind first for me was based on the Classical Athenian play Antigone by Sophocles. In the play, the main character Antigone goes against the rule of King Creon to properly bury her dead brother Polynices. Athenian women in Classical times had limited rights, but burial rites were among the most important. Thus, although the Classical period and the Early Bronze Age were millennia apart, and although the regions of Greece at hand were very distinct from one another, I wonder if women played a similarly important role in the practice of Bronze Age burials. Since the figurines are primarily found in the context of graves, they seem to be imbued with religious or burial significance. Could the importance of burial rituals for women possibly be linked to the higher rate of female figurines than males? This does not seem like a particularly probable theory, but it is an interesting thought nonetheless. Second, although I do not know much about Bronze Age religious beliefs, from some preliminary research on the topic there seems to be a case for a “life-bearing goddess” (see the Sumerian Kishar, Akkadian Ishtar, and Babylonian Astarte for reference) being represented by the female Cycladic figurines. The exposed breasts and genitalia of the Cycladic figurines faintly resemble that of Venus of Willendorf, a 30,000-year-old figurine found on the Danube in present-day Austria. The possibility of there being a goddess of such significance in Bronze Age culture leads me to believe that depictions of her might have been buried with the dead. Third, it occurred to me that the looters might have placed more value on the male figurines, and prioritized taking those over the females, leaving the actual archaeologists with a skewed gender distribution of the figurines. In summary, there are many other thoughts that have occurred to me about the prevalence of female Cycladic figurines—too many and too incoherent to list here, but definitely something that I will continue to look into.
Some of my remaining, more stream-of-consciousness questions that I will revisit throughout the trip are as follows: Why are some female characteristics present, but not others, such as hair? Was the Early Cycladic perception of gender much different from ours, and is it too long ago to project such binary categories as male and female on the figures (considering there are examples of “pregnant males”? If more of the pigment of the figures had been maintained, would we know more about gender presentation (was there such a thing as makeup or colors that were associated with different genders?)?
As our guide told us, “all is fair in the study of prehistoric societies,” since nothing was written down and therefore we cannot know absolutely what these people were thinking. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed our visit to the Museum of Cycladic Art, and I plan on going back to take a closer look. Similarly, for museums that I have yet to visit across Greece, I will be interested to see the distribution of depictions of male- vs female-presenting figures in art and sculpture.
Sources: Met Museum, Cycladic Figures, 2024 (https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/articles/2024/01/cycladic-figures); Weber, G.W., Lukeneder, A., Harzhauser, M. et al. The microstructure and the origin of the Venus from Willendorf. Sci Rep 12, 2926 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-06799-z ; Hendrix, Elizabeth. “Painted Ladies of the Early Bronze Age.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 55, no. 3 (1997): 4–15. https://doi.org/10.2307/3258798.