Excerpt; Cyclades Islands, 2600 B.C.

Excerpt; Cyclades Islands, 2600 B.C.
Marble.
Work featured in the exhibition catalog "Den genfundne tid. Kulturvandinger - Skaberkraft," 2019. Work co-published and exhibited by the Johannes Larsen Museum (Kerteminde, Denmark) and the Museum of Religious Art (Lemvig, Denmark), p. 32.
Provenance: Peter Brandes Collection.
Measurements: 5.5 x 5.4 cm.
The extraordinary ability to evoke the human figure through essential forms is one of the most fascinating features of Cycladic art. This fragment of a female statuette, carved from marble around 2600 B.C., preserves the torso and breasts, barely hinted at through soft volumes—a testament to a sculptural language whose surprising modernity continues to captivate more than four millennia after its creation. Although many of these sculptures have survived in fragments, their expressive power remains intact. They are believed to have represented female figures associated with funerary, ritual, or symbolic practices related to fertility and regeneration, although their exact function remains a subject of debate. Their powerful formal abstraction exerted a profound influence on numerous 20th-century artists, including Constantin Brâncuși, Amedeo Modigliani, and Henry Moore, who found in Cycladic art a precursor to modern sculpture.
The Cyclades Islands, located in the Aegean Sea and centered around the sacred island of Delos, were one of the major cultural centers of the eastern Mediterranean during the third millennium B.C. The abundance of high-quality marble, especially from the quarries of Paros and Antiparos, fostered the development of an unprecedented sculptural tradition. Cycladic artisans succeeded in transforming this material into figures of extraordinary formal purity, characterized by the geometric simplification of volumes and a refined sense of proportion.These works were carved with stone tools and natural abrasives, likely using emery from the island of Naxos—a mineral of extraordinary hardness that allowed for carefully polished surfaces and a finish of remarkable technical quality. This mastery of marble foreshadowed the sculptural tradition that, centuries later, would make Greece one of the great pillars of Western art.