Marble Grave Stele of a Woman in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, July 2007

Marble Grave Stele of a Woman
Greek, Boeotian, ca. 400 BC

Accession # 08.258.42

The deceased, sitting on a chair, holds a lekythos (oil flask) in her raised left hand and a large pyxis (box) on her lap. Although the stele is said to be from Attica, the simplified treatment of the pediment, the somewhat stiff pose of the figure, and the type of marble suggest that it was carved in Boeotia. A flat area at the upper right of the relief has been worked over with a claw chisel, leaving short, parallel, toothlike marks. Such marks would be unlikely on finished grave reliefs of the classical period, for they would have been smoothed with a flat chisel. The presence of the marks suggests that the stele was reworked at a later time. A number of stelai with similar reworked surfaces have been found at Thespiae in Boeotia. During the Roman period, the Thespians reused ancestral gravestones from the late fifth and fourth centuries BC to mark the graves of their own dead. The reliefs were often slightly refurbished: surfaces might be reworked with a claw chisel, inscriptions replaced with new ones, and figures totally removed.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art label.