A victorious rider and horse. The head was found and taken to France by the man who gives it its name, Georges Rampin. Ten years earlier, a body of a horseman and fragments of a horse had also been found on the Acropolis. It was later realised that the two belonged together.
The rider’s hair is elaborately garlanded with wild celery, which was used to crown winners in the Nemean Games and the Isthmian Games, held in Corinth. So the sculpture probably represents a champion rider. Only wealthy aristocrats owned race horses in Ancient Greece. The facial resemblance between it and the Peplos Kore suggests that the two may be by the same sculptor
Head: Paris Louvre 3104. Body and horse: Athens Acropolis Museum 590
Lippold: Griechische Plastik, 79 (n.20), pl. 22.3
Schrader: Archaischen Marmorbildwerke des Akropolis (1939), 212
Payne & Young: Archaic Marble Sculpture from the Acropolis, 4
Stewart: Greek Sculpture, 120, pls. 125 & 127
Found on the Acropolis, Athens, west of the Erechtheum
