Tanagra figurine

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Molded terracotta nude of a goddess, Alexandrian (Greco-Roman Museum, Alexandria)
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Molded terracotta nude of a goddess, Alexandrian (Greco-Roman Museum, Alexandria)

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The mold-cast terracotta Tanagra figurines, produced from the later fourth century BCE, were a specialty of the Boeotian town of Tanagra in Greece. They were coated with a liquid white slip before firing and were sometimes painted afterwards in naturalistic tints with watercolors, such as the famous "Dame en Bleu" at the Louvre.

Tanagra figures depict real women — and some men and boys — in everyday costume, with familiar accessories like hats, wreaths or fans. Some character pieces[1] may have represented stock figures from the New Comedy of Menander and other writers. Others continued an earlier tradition of molded terracotta figures used as cult images or votive objects.

The coraplasters, or sculptors of the models that provided the molds, delighted in revealing the body under the folds of a himation thrown round the shoulders like a cloak and covering the head, over a chiton, and the movements of such drapery in action.

[edit] Discovery

Tanagra figures had not been much noted before the end of the 1860s, when ploughmen of Vratsi in Boeotia, Greece, began to uncover tombs ranging in date over many centuries. Inside and outside the tombs of the Hellenistic period — third to first centuries BCE — were many small terracotta figures. Great quantities found in excavation sites at Tanagra identified the city as the source of these figures, which were also exported to distant markets. In addition, such figures were made in many other Mediterranean sites, in Alexandria, Tarentum in Magna Graecia and Myrina.

The figures appeal to nineteenth-century middle-class ideals of realism, and "Tanagra figures" entered the visual repertory of Europeans: Oscar Wilde, in the script of An Ideal Husband (1895), described the character of Mabel Chiltern: "she is really like a Tanagra statuette, and would be rather annoyed if she were told so." Under the pressure of collectors' demand, Tanagra terracottas began to be faked.[2]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ The head and torso of an actor in comedy wearing a grotesquely grinning satyr's mask is at the Musée du Louvre.
  2. ^ Zink and Porto 2005 report that 20% of the Tanagra terracottas in the British Museum have been identified as fakes.

[edit] References

  • Besques-Mollard, Simone, 1950. Tanagra (Paris: Braun)
  • Tanagra - Myth and Archaeology Exhibition, Paris, 2003; Montreal, 2004.

[edit] External links

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