Caryatid

Amedeo Modigliani is primarily known as a painter though he predominantly made sculpture between 1909 and 1914, producing twenty-eight known sculptures [see L.234]. Towards the end of this period, between 1912 and 1914, he made over seventy Caryatid drawings. These relate to his sculptural ambition to create a secular ‘temple to humanity’ surrounded by caryatid sculptures, in which female figures would act as ‘columns of tenderness’. Only one sculpture is known on the subject, a carving now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, yet the related drawings represent some of his most impressive works on paper. These drawings are created from the imagination, though Modigliani also liked to draw from life.

Modigliani’s interest in caryatids was both formal and symbolic:

“Modigliani was enchanted by these figures – at once real and unreal – whose inflexibility, imposed by their functional role, is relieved by the fantasy of their being atlantes or idealized women.” [1]

Each drawing depicts a woman with her arms raised to the height of her head to support a weight extending beyond the top of the paper. The first of these drawings were more expressive, whereas from 1912 they became more geometric. Most in the latter group are kneeling. Each body is rendered in round curves, echoing Modigliani’s famed approach to representing facial features with simple lines across his drawing, painting and sculpture. The present drawing is rendered in such curves, with heavier shading around its perimeter, emphasising a solid mass. The internal lines are created with pencil and the dark outlines delineated in a softer crayon. Beyond the outline there is almost no shading within the body and very little on the face.

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