The Poetics of Appearance in the Attic Korai

Dating to the 6th and early 5th century BC, the fifty-six Attic korai that stood on the Athenian Acropolis have been long regarded as representative of a generic type of statue alluding to female beauty. In her reassessment of the statues, Mary Stieber argues that these 'marble maidens', dedications to Athena, can and should be described in terms of their individuality and life-likeness. Exploring the historiography of those re-discovered objects, she reveals how and why scholarship has chosen to label them as an anonymous generic type akin to the male kouros statues. In using literary evidence alongside visual analyses, Steiber demonstrates that what the statues lacked in naturalism they made up for in realism. The final chapter includes a detailed look at the Phrasikleia kore, an Attic grave marker, and a discussion of the young woman it depicted.