The female figure from which this cast was taken was found on the Acropolis in Athens and, like so much Greek marble sculpture, originally brightly painted. Our second cast of the same statue is restored and painted, to give a better sense of how it might have looked. 

Today in the New Acropolis Museum, you can still see some this pigment with the naked eye; more of it has been brought to light by modern technologies. Our cast is grey in comparison. In other respects, however, it reproduces the statue as it survives today: minus the metal headdress and earrings that it once wore and without its left hand, which was fashioned from a separate piece of marble.

The statue’s modern name comes from the ancient Greek: ‘kore’ means ‘maiden’ and a ‘peplos’ is the outer garment that she is traditionally seen as wearing. 

• More information about our painted Peplos Kore