Hellenistic Bronze statuette of a veiled and masked dancer, 3rd–2nd century BCE, Ptolemaic Period, Egypt

A week ago, I illustrated one of my "wisdom" posts with an image of a veiled vestal virgin produced by Italian sculptor Antonio Corradini.  He is famous for his ability to use solid medium like marble to depict illusory veiled women where the contours of their face and body can be discerned beneath the "veil".  Well, this morning while browsing artifacts in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I saw an amazing Greek bronze sculpture created in the 3rd - 2nd century BCE in Alexandria, Egypt that possesses the same ethereal quality as those much more modern sculptures of Corradini.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art observes:

The complex motion of this dancer is conveyed exclusively through the interaction of the body with several layers of dress. Over an undergarment that falls in deep folds and trails heavily, the figure wears a lightweight mantle, drawn tautly over her head and body by the pressure applied to it by her right arm, left hand, and right leg. Its substance is conveyed by the alternation of the tubular folds pushing through from below and the freely curling softness of the fringe. The woman's face is covered by the sheerest of veils, discernible at its edge below her hairline and at the cutouts for the eyes. Her extended right foot shows a laced slipper. This dancer has been convincingly identified as one of the professional entertainers, a combination of mime and dancer, for which the cosmopolitan city of Alexandria was famous in antiquity.



Image: Hellenistic Bronze statuette of a veiled and masked dancer, 3rd–2nd century BCE, purchased from a Cairo antiquities dealer in 1926 and thought to be from Alexandria, Egypt.


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