Caryatid

Original caricatures of the Erecteon, exhibited at the Museum of the Acropolis of Athens, protected by a glass.

Cariátide in Delfos

Erecteon with Cariátides in the Acropolis of Athens

A caryatid (Ancient and Neo-Greek: Καρυάτις, plural: Καρυάτιδες) is a sculpted female figure, with the function of a column or pilaster, with an entablature resting on her head. The most typical of the examples is the Tribune of the Caryatids in the Erechtheion, one of the temples of the Acropolis in Athens.

Its name is related to the ancient city of Carias (Καρυές), in Laconia, where a festival of girls who danced in honor of Artemis Caryatid was celebrated. On the other hand, an account by Vitruvius indicated that this city being Allied with the Persians during the Medical Wars, its inhabitants were exterminated by the other Greeks, its women were turned into slaves and condemned to carry the heaviest loads. He sculpts them, instead of typically Greek columns, so that they are condemned for all eternity to support the weight of the temple.

In 1550, Jean Goujon (architect and sculptor to King Henry II of France) carved caryatids in the Louvre, which support the musicians' platform in the Swiss guards room (now called Caryatids). Goujon had only known about the Erechtheion caryatids through inscriptions and had never seen the originals.

The Spanish writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna, who lived for several years in Buenos Aires (Argentina), wrote that he wanted "all the caryatids of the city to cry" for his death.

One of the best-known assembly halls of the Dominican National Palace bears the name Las Cariátides, since it alternates white marble columns and beautiful half-naked caryatids.

If the figure is male, it is called an atlantean or telamon.

From a hieratic figure in Antiquity, the figure of the caryatid became over the course of the XIX century extremely lascivious, with the tightest drapes and very suggestive poses, etc. (see Source Wallace).