Why Is That Column Shaped Like a Woman? She Is Holding Up the Roof

A column carries weight straight down through a solid uniform shaft, and replacing it with a human figure introduces a narrow point exactly where the load is greatest, which is the neck. Sculptors solved that in a specific and visible way. The figures are carved with thick hair falling in heavy masses down the back of the neck, which is not only decorative but adds material precisely where the section would otherwise be dangerously thin. The stance is also weighted, with one leg straight and locked and the other relaxed, so that the load runs down a continuous line of stone from the head through the straight leg.

The best known set is on the Athenian Acropolis:

• •Six figures on the south porch of the Erechtheion, from around 420 BCE
• •Each around two and a third metres tall, carved from Pentelic marble
• •All differ in detail while matching in overall form
• •Five originals are in the Acropolis Museum, replaced on site by copies
• •One was removed by Lord Elgin and is in the British Museum
• •Its absence and the dispute over it remain unresolved

The origin of the term is uncertain and the traditional explanation is probably wrong. Vitruvius, writing in the first century before the common era, claimed the figures commemorated the women of Karyai, a city that sided with the Persians and whose women were enslaved and depicted bearing the weight of the building as a punishment. Modern scholars generally reject that, noting that it appears nowhere earlier, that the figures are dignified rather than degraded, and that the more likely connection is to the young women who performed ritual dances in honour of Artemis at Karyai, carrying baskets on their heads. The word used in the ancient building accounts is simply maidens.

A male figure used the same way has its own name and a quite different character. Such figures are generally shown straining visibly under the weight, with bent backs, raised arms and muscles tensed, where the female figures stand upright and appear unburdened, and that contrast is deliberate rather than accidental. The male versions appear widely in Renaissance and baroque architecture, supporting balconies, doorways and cornices, frequently as half figures emerging from the wall below the waist. The visible effort became a decorative convention in its own right, and the figures are commonest exactly where the load they appear to carry is smallest.

The Athenian figures have suffered in ways that are instructive about conservation generally. They stood in the open for two and a half thousand years, surviving conversion of the building to a church and to a harem and an explosion in 1827. The serious damage came in the twentieth century, when air pollution in Athens converted the marble surface to gypsum and dissolved the detail rapidly, and the decision to remove them indoors in 1979 was made because the loss was measurable year on year. They were cleaned with lasers, which removed the black crust while leaving the original surface beneath, and that technique was developed substantially on this work.

Putting a human figure where a column goes creates a dangerously thin section at the neck, which sculptors filled with heavy carved hair while running the load down a locked straight leg. The six Athenian figures date from around 420 BCE, and five are now indoors because air pollution was dissolving them measurably. Vitruvius explained the name as a punishment, which modern scholars reject.