Caryatid

A caryatid is a statue of woman supporting a Entablement on its head, it replaces a column.

They are figures of women vêtues of long tunics which one places as columns, of pillars or pilasters. This name, which wants to say inhabitants of Caryes (town of Laconie), comes, says one, of what, this city being itself allied with Persians during the invasion, its inhabitants were exterminated by the other Greeks and their wives reduced in slavery, and condemned to carry the heaviest burdens.

On the baldachin of the Érechthéion, statues representing of the young girls, the Caryatids, the columns replace.

In 1550, Jean Goujon (architect and sculptor of the king Henri II) constructed caryatids with the Louvre, they support the platform of the musicians in the room of the Swiss guards (today known as of the caryatids). It is about a quotation of the caryatids of Érechthéion on the Acropolis of Athens, however Goujon had been informed of it only by descriptions and had never visited the original.

Of hieratic figure in the Antiquity, the figure of the caryatid became during the 19th century extremely lascive, with draped more grinding, of the more suggestive installations, etc (see Fontaine Wallace).

See too

Telamon (male equivalent of the caryatid).

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