“The Lady of Elche”
The mysterious “Lady of Elche,” a 2,400-year-old bust of a mysterious woman of “high lineage,” was carved from a large block of limestone before the Romans dominated Hispania.
On a hot summer day in 1897, a farmer in Elche, a city on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, discovered a painted limestone bustlife-size, of a mysterious-looking woman, among a pile of apparently discarded stones.
The statue, currently known as “La Dama de Elche”, is a fusion of ancient artistic styles and could represent a goddess or priestessnote or .
Shortly after the discovery of the bust, French archaeologist Peter Paris he acquired it and took it to the Louvre, in Paris, where the Lady of Elche was on display for several decades. During World War II, the bust was returned to Spain, and today it is part of the collection of the National Archaeological Museum of Spain.
The Lady of Elche 56 cm tall and weighs just over 65 kg. Carved from a block of limestone, the bust represents a richly adorned woman with a pointed tiara and a frontal diadem covered by a veil. The headdress’s straps end in huge rosettes near the ears.
The woman wears a cape-like cloaksecured by a small pin; it opens at the front, revealing three necklaces with amulets. Earrings and ribbons adorn the sides of the face. Traces of paint remain on the lips, on parts of the face and on clothing.
At the back of the bust there is a large hole, which suggests that it may have been used as a funeral urn to store cremation remains. Its appearance, which blends styles Iberian, Greek and North African, contributed to the emergence of accusations that the bust was a forgery.
In a 1995 book, art historian John F. Moffitt suggested that the bust could have been executed at the end of the 19th century by the well-known Spanish art forger Francisco Pallas y Puig.
However, later scientific analyzes revealed that the pigments of the Lady of Elche they were actually oldand that the ashes found in the rear cavity of the bust came from an ancient cremation.
Although it has been proven that the Lady of Elche has more than 2,400 yearsexperts still continue to debate whether the sculpture was originally a bust or part of a full-length figure.
It also remains unclear who the Lady of Elche intended to represent. One of the hypotheses is that andwould be associated with Tanitthe main deity of Carthage in Antiquity, highlighting religious similarities between the Iberian and Punic peoples.
The National Archaeological Museum, however, states that “the identity of the figure is a mystery”. The Lady of Elche is considered to have attributes that are both human and divine, having been “more recently interpreted as an Iberian lady of high lineage who was deified by her descendants”.
Whoever the “Lady of Elche” was, only the Gods of antiquity know — and the mystery remains still in our days.
