caryatid

caryatid, in classical architecture, draped female figure used instead of a column as a support. In marble architecture they first appeared in pairs in three small buildings (treasuries) at Delphi (550–530 bc), and their origin can be traced back to mirror handles of nude figures carved from ivory in Phoenicia and draped figures cast from bronze in archaic Greece. According to a story related by the 1st-century-bc Roman architectural writer Vitruvius, caryatids represented the women of Caryae, who were doomed to hard labour because the town sided with the Persians in 480 bc during their second invasion of Greece.

The most celebrated example is the caryatid porch of the Erechtheum with six figures (420–415 bc), on the Acropolis of Athens. They were later directly copied, in alternation with columns, in the Roman emperor Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli. Other examples include the figure at the Villa Albani at Rome and two colossal figures in the smaller propylon at Eleusis. They also appeared in the upper stories of Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa’s Pantheon and in the colonnade surrounding the Forum of Augustus at Rome, as well as in the Incantada Salonika (Thessaloníki, Greece).

Caryatids are sometimes called korai (“maidens”). Similar figures, bearing baskets on their heads, are called canephores (from kanēphoroi, “basket carriers”); they represent the maidens who carried sacred objects used at feasts of the gods. The male counterparts of caryatids are referred to as atlantes (see atlas).