Faculty of Classics - University of Cambridge

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The Peplos Kore

The Peplos Kore is the best known exhibit in the Museum of Classical Archaeology. It is a plaster cast of an ancient Greek statue of a young woman (kore means young woman or girl in ancient Greek), wearing a garment called a peplos. She is painted brightly as the original would have been, which was set up on the Acropolis in Athens, around 530 BCE.

It has been known since the end of the eighteenth century that the Ancient Greeks painted their sculptures bright colours and adorned them with metal jewellery. In fact, Pliny the Elder wrote in the first century about how statues were coloured and polished. Then, in the later nineteenth century, excavations on the Acropolis found several statues on which traces of coloured paint could still be seen on the marble surface.

 
In 1975 the Museum acquired a new plaster cast of the sculpture. As the Museum already had one, the Curator, Robert Cook, decided to restore the second cast and paint it to appear as we believe the original did. As so little paint remains on the original, the restored version does not claim to be exactly right; indeed, recent scientific analysis suggests that the paintwork may have been even more elaborate, and may have gone through a number of different designs. But the repainted Peplos Kore gives a good impression of what the ancient sculpture looked like.

 

 

Nineteenth century notions of the Classical Ideal made it hard for many people to accept that ancient Greek sculpture really was brightly coloured. Some neoclassisists, praising the pure white beauty of bare marble and the austere nobility of the architecture, were really imposing nineteenth century aesthetics and morality onto ancient Greek culture. Thus the acceptance of coloured sculpture was retarded. This resistance still lingers today: many museum visitors are shocked, horrified even, to see the blues and reds of the Peplos Kore. One memorable comment in the Visitors' Book was "Didn't like the Painted Woman".

The Peplos Kore is 1.18 metres tall and made of Parian marble. It was made around 530 BCE. The original is in the Acropolis Museum in Athens (Acr. 679) and the traces of paint can still be seen, although they have faded since the statue was excavated from a pit by the Erechtheum on the Acropolis in 1884. It had been dumped there as part of the renovation after the Persians had destroyed the Acropolis in 480 and 479 BCE.

She wears a red garment called a peplos which is gathered at the waist and pinned at the shoulders. The peplos is decorated with a green and white patterned band at its edges and green trimmings. Under the peplos is a blue crinkly garment called a chiton. The little umbrella on her head is called a meniskos and was to keep the weather and birds off. Her left arm was extended with an offering for the gods.

 

1996 Repainting

The cast of the Peplos Kore in the Museum of Classical Archaeology was repainted in 1996, since the paints used in 1975 had faded and cracked.

Picture Acknowledgements

1) Schrader, Archaischen Marmorbildwerke der Akropolis
2) Lullies & Hirmer, Griechische Plastik
3) Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge
4) Pekridon-Gorecki, Mode im Antiken Griechenland