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The marble figure is beautifully carved. It has a lyre-shaped head, a prominent, angular nose with a rounded chin and broad sloping shoulders. The small breasts are pointed, the narrow arms folded perfectly above one another, gently curving across the swollen abdomen, and the angular elbows project out from the body. The swollen abdomen suggests the figure is pregnant. Below the stomach line, the pubic triangle is outlined with shallow incisions and the legs are divided by a deep cleft at the front and a shallow one at the back. Especially on his larger pieces such as this, "[…] one can fully appreciate the harmony of proportion, the elegant understatement of line, and the careful workmanship that must have contributed to [his; meaning the Goulandris Master] unprecedented popularity […]”
Note
With their simple, geometric lines providing them with a timeless minimalism, Cycladic marble figures have been attracting and disarming the modern viewer for millennia.
In accordance with the typology of Cycladic figures, this piece belongs to the so-called ‘Spedos’ variety, named after an Early Cycladic cemetery on the island of Naxos. This figure shows all the characteristic details of this type. The marble figures were produced on several Cycladic Islands and are hugely similar in style, with few variations. They can be attributed to different ‘hands’ due to the distinctive technique of each sculptor. The figure depicted here has been attributed to the Goulandris Master by Patricia Getz-Preciosi.
The Goulandris Master is not only one of the most skilled Cycladic sculptors, but also the most prolific. According to Getz-Preciosi, he must have been the most important artist of his time. All the figures display distinctive features of the artist's style: a rounded back; strongly sloping shoulders; small, widely spaced breasts; and a line running across the abdomen forming the top of the pubic triangle. The larger figures sculpted by the Goulandris Master typically show more refined details than the smaller ones. The profiles of these are usually more slender, their outline contours tend to be more pronounced, and their elbows stand out further from the body. Such figures are, for the most part, more harmoniously conceived and more delicately executed.
The Goulandris Master is named after a Greek private collection containing two or more complete figures (now at the Goulandris Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens, Greece). He was active sometime in the period from 2500 to 2400 B.C.
In the 20th century, artists such as Picasso, Matisse, Brancusi, Arp, and Moore collected Cycladic art as models of inspiration for their highly abstracted forms.
