Mould-made Terracotta Head of a Woman with a Diadem and Painted Features

Cypro-Archaic II to Cypro-Classical I, c. 600–400 BCE · Terracotta · Mould-made, painted

A small terracotta head with a stump of neck, broken at the base of the neck. The face was pressed in a mould: an oval with a low forehead, a straight nose and a small, full mouth set above a rounded chin. A flat band crosses the forehead, and above it runs a row of raised bosses, which may be beads, rosettes or stylised curls. The top of the head is broken flat, so a taller headdress may be lost. Hair or a veil falls at either side of the face to the jaw.

Red paint survives well. It fills and outlines the almond-shaped eyes, colours the lips and touches the bosses of the diadem. Over the rest of the surface a pale ground remains in patches, and the tip of the nose is chipped white.

Commentary

The head belongs to a small figurine of a woman, most probably a votary. Moulds for faces and heads, a technique shared with the Phoenician coast, were in use in Cyprus by the Cypro-Archaic period and became common for the heads of small female figurines [2]. The figures were dedicated in large numbers in island sanctuaries and sometimes placed in tombs.

The band with a row of raised ornaments above the brow is the most useful feature for dating. A mould-made female head in the Louvre (AM 3732) wears a diadem of the same kind, decorated with vertical incisions, and is dated c. 600–580 BCE [3]. Painted mould-made heads of women continue well into the Classical period, however: a head of a female worshipper or priestess from the sanctuary at Achna in the British Museum (2009,5019.62), only 6.2 cm high, is dated 500–300 BCE [4]. The softness of this face, with its fuller lower cheeks and less emphatic smile, could favour the later part of the sequence, but the evidence is not strong enough to narrow the range beyond c. 600–400 BCE.

The painting follows the usual Cypriot practice on clay heads, where red is used for lips and for bands and ornaments of the headdress, and black or red for eyes and brows. A mould-made male head in the Metropolitan Museum (74.51.1445) shows the same division of colour, red on the lips and dark paint on the eyes [1]. Here only red survives, so the whole scheme may once have included black that has faded.

Regional coroplastic workshops, among them Idalion, Achna, Arsos and Kition, can be told apart by facial type and dress [5], but a detached head of this size does not carry enough to assign it to one of them. The face and the paint are those of the Cypriot mould-made tradition.