![]() Today, some scholars think they were given the faces of Appius Claudius’ daughters. Each caryatid bore a sacred basket ( kistai) on her head. Two caryatids would guard the entrance: representing the priestesses of the goddess. In the year 54 B.C.E., at Eleusis on the outskirts of Rome, the consul Appius Claudius Pulcher (a friend of Cicero’s) held the dedication ceremony for the Inner Propylaia of a sanctuary to Demeter. The Roman Empire is one possible origin, one way to sketch a history of Reveley’s caryatid. Like the auction catalogue for Reveley’s estate, the caryatid is a collector’s delight. To trace their various paths through history is to accumulate a catalogue of different iterations of the caryatid-in a way, different sketches of the form. Such imitations had become ruins long before being reproduced in Reveley’s notebook: his sketch, then, was a copy many times removed.Įach thing we see hides another: these copies simultaneously point at and muddy their origin. Reveley’s reproduction survived, but the statue that he sketched was itself an imitation of a Greek tradition of caryatids-a tradition that, in turn, imitated artistic forerunners even more ancient, traditions to which we no longer have access. But he was hardly the first or last to be drawn to it: the caryatid would prick aesthetic pleasure and imperial desire for later British visitors to these ancient grounds. Reveley said nothing about why he chose to sketch that particular statue, which likely represented a priestess of the cult of Ceres, rather than the goddess herself. Like the Magritte, the mood of Reveley’s sketch is at once oneiric and ordinary. The figure is a caryatid-an architectural female column-but in Reveley’s sketch it looks like an ancient, female Magritte.Ī piece like Magritte’s Memory places an architectural fragment within a scene at once strange and everyday The Son of Man and The Difficult Passage, meanwhile, play at portraiture while refusing the pleasures of the face. The sun burns down on the statue and the basket casts a shadow over the upper part of the disappearing face. An ornate basket decorated with agricultural symbols sits on her head, part of which is also crumbling. ![]() Above her left shoulder hangs the knot of a robe. The rest of the statue seems to be buried beneath the ground. In the sketch, the head and shoulders of a faceless woman-her features worn by weather and time-rear up from a grassy knoll. The statue is set beside the ruined temple of Eleusis-an ancient town on Greece’s Thriasian plain. This piece, listed in the auction catalogue as “View of a Fragment,” is a sketch of a massive statue of the goddess Ceres, or Demeter, as the Greeks called her. Among these landscapes and studies, all in pen and ink with watercolor, one is quite different from the others. On offer at the auction for Reveley’s estate were eighteen volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica a violin and a violoncello a pair of pistols and a sword three pieces of Indian Ink in a jappanned box a container holding a “quantity of curious Turkish pipe heads” and dozens of sketches of “Views” from Reveley’s 1785 journey to the Levant. His drawings, as perusers of the auction lots were told, were “universally known to all the lovers of art, and admirers of classic Antiquity.” ![]() &c.”, belonging to “that distinguished Artist and Civil Engineer, the Athenian Reveley.” The recently deceased Willey Reveley was the second of only two eighteenth-century architects to have been given the moniker Athenian by London society. On the docket for that day was a “truly valuable and interesting collection of drawings, designs, prints, books ![]() At twelve o’clock on Monday, May 11, 1801, there was to be an auction at Christie’s in London. ![]()
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