Marble grave stele of a woman

Marble grave stele of a woman

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The deceased, seated on a chair, holds a lekythos (oil flask) in her raised left hand and a large pyxis (box) on her lap. Although the stele is said to be from Attica, the simplified treatment of the pediment, the somewhat stiff pose of the figure, and the type of marble suggest that it was carved in Boeotia. A flat area at the upper right of the relief has been worked over with a claw chisel, leaving short, parallel, toothlike marks. Such marks would be unlikely on finished grave reliefs of the classical period, for they would have been smoothed with a flat chisel. The presence of the marks suggests that the stele was reworked at a later time. A number of stelai with similar reworked surfaces have been found at Thespiae, in Boeotia. During the Roman period, the Thespians reused ancestral gravestones from the late fifth and fourth centuries B.C. to mark the graves of their own dead. The reliefs were often slightly refurbished: surfaces might be reworked with a claw chisel, inscriptions replaced with new ones, and figures totally removed.

Greek and Roman Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Marble grave stele of a womanMarble grave stele of a womanMarble grave stele of a womanMarble grave stele of a womanMarble grave stele of a woman

The Museum's collection of Greek and Roman art comprises more than thirty thousand works ranging in date from the Neolithic period (ca. 4500 B.C.) to the time of the Roman emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity in A.D. 312. It includes the art of many cultures and is among the most comprehensive in North America. The geographic regions represented are Greece and Italy, but not as delimited by modern political frontiers: Greek colonies were established around the Mediterranean basin and on the shores of the Black Sea, and Cyprus became increasingly Hellenized. For Roman art, the geographical limits coincide with the expansion of the Roman Empire. The department also exhibits the art of prehistoric Greece (Helladic, Cycladic, and Minoan) and pre-Roman art of Italic peoples, notably the Etruscans.