(All photographs by the author and Joanne Murphy)
December 2025
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Nonacademic writers choosing to discuss aspects of a particular masterpiece of art history must remain cautious when presenting subjective and speculative interpretations that are beyond the realm of objective, fact-based analysis. That said, expert and glancing tourist alike tend to experience strongly personal and somewhat visceral reactions standing before historic works of artistic genius. The mind’s eye may lead the viewer into varying states of enhanced emotional reaction or towards a realm of abstraction awakened from unconscious, silent dormancy.
While visiting Athens in mid-2025, my awe-inspiring climb to the highest level of the Acropolis culminated with the sight of the remains of the ancient Parthenon as well as that of the adjacent Erechtheion. The latter temple, likely constructed between 421 BCE and 406 BCE, includes six world-famous sculpted female Caryatid figures which double as architectural columns supporting the entablature of the building. Even knowing that the statues are replicas put in place in 1978 to preserve the originals from continued decay, the sight of Caryatids literally shining in the bright sunlight amid the ruins of the Acropolis could not diminish their startling impact. As with other architectural remnants of ancient Athens, changes were made to the temple through the centuries for adapted usages of the building, including replacing or rearranging the original stones. In any case, the Erechtheion is as close to perfection as any in situ ancient ruin and radiates jewel-like amongst the other magnificent gems of the Acropolis.
Five of the original Caryatids from the site are housed in the Acropolis Museum, with one, “Lord Elgin’s”, on display in the British Museum (because of course it is) grabbed by Lord Elgin between1801 and 1803. He took longer to remove (loot?) other works from the site, including the famed Elgin Marbles, also long housed in the British Museum. It is interesting that the Acropolis Museum displays 40 of the Parthenon friezes and the curators have created a good number of temporary reconstructive renderings of the missing blocks in the certainty of their eventual return from Britain to their proper home. The museum apparently is as confident of their eventual homecoming as Penelope was waiting years for Odysseus to journey back to Ithaca after the Trojan War.
The original Caryatids are on view within the confines of a beautifully lit designated gallery at the museum allowing visitors several vantage points from which to absorb the figures, collectively or one at a time. On the day of my visit, many tourists in the room seemed absorbed in pensive meditation on the statues’ beauty, historic importance, and obscure nature. There is an overwhelming power of presence to the Caryatid figures, and their sublime, perfected elegance opens the door to cautious joyfulness of new experience particularly when confronted by an unsolvable mystery of this magnitude. A tsunami-like wave of tactile-induced awe becomes the space and attendant atmosphere.
The actual word, Caryatids, is from the Greek term karyatides, “maidens of Karyai”, referring to that ancient town (aka Carya) of the Peloponnese. There is a lack of substantial evidence from the originating time period about specific planning and construction of the temple that might serve to direct us towards understanding its likely religious purpose and meaning. As an example of the historic uncertainty surrounding them, Caryatids in general were discussed in the writings of both Vitruvius (c. 80–70 BC – after c. 15 BC) in De Architectura, as well as by Pausanias (c. 110 AD – c. 180 AD) in his renown travelogue, Description of Greece, with the former describing them as representing the burden carried by the city Carya for having joined the Persians in their war against the Greeks, while the latter believes them to likely represent the women of that town who danced and sang at the annual celebratory open air festival held in the sanctuary of Artemis Caryatis (Artemis of the Walnut Tree) where stood a statue of the goddess. *
As I approached the figures in the museum for a closer look and gazed upon the time-ravaged facial details of the Caryatids, I felt an unexpected and unusual synchronicity with Michelangelo’s four figurative, allegorical statues speculated to represent Night, Day, Dusk and Dawn. These works have been situated since completion in the early to mid-16th century in the beautiful Medici Chapels of San Lorenzo in Florence, along with other sculptures by the artist. The chapel’s Sagrestia Nuova (New Sacristy) is a unique space for serious contemplation on the visionary expression of Italy’s most lauded Renaissance genius and his talent for creating chiseled perfection. The Chapel is much larger than the Acropolis Museum’s gallery dedicated to the Caryatids, and with just a handful of people in the room on the day of my visit, I was granted a serenely quiet atmosphere in which to patiently absorb the artwork and architectural details of the exceptional setting. Though created centuries apart and for completely different purposes, both sculpture series induce solemn, thought-filled meditation as visitors are allowed unusual proximity to achievements that rank amongst mankind’s greatest aesthetic triumphs.
Michelangelo’s sculptures are not, of course, time-ravaged works from an obscure ancient culture, and I found it interesting that the faces of the two male personifications, Dusk and especially Day, feel more classical in composition in comparison to their smoothly polished female brethren, Dawn and Night. The former may have been deliberately left unfinished as if to appear weathered by time in the manner of the Roman and Athenian remains that were so beloved and embraced as sources of inspiration and education in Humanist Renaissance society.
The choice to design and present the male figures as impressionistic renderings served Michelangelo’s intellectual agenda well. The sculptures are also reminiscent in stylistic conception and execution of the features of Nicodemus (possibly Joseph of Arimathea) of Michelangelo’s Deposition, also in Florence; the hooded, obscured Nicodemus has often been considered by art historians to be a self-portrait of the artist in his later years.
The Master’s artistic endeavors are often understood and clarified by way of the remaining archival documents created during his lifetime. Given how many years he would take to progress on several of his complex and overly ambitious commissions, often interrupted for long periods by the demands of other projects, a number of these undertakings fell short of completion or had to be adjusted to a smaller scale and scope. It is therefore no surprise to find numerous gaps in the surviving written records detailing project plans. There is naturally less of a paper trail of Michelangelo’s personal and private intentions as well. (Giorgio Vasari’s contemporaneous biography and his encounters and friendship with Michelangelo cannot completely replace detailed program descriptions and instructions of a patron’s written instructions; yet Vasari does add an extremely informative dimension to the myth and the man of Michelangelo.) The scheme of the Medici Chapels is one example of the artist’s exhausting endeavors, taking about 14 years of work to never fully reach completion; the original contract has vanished as well and likely included notes of great historical importance.
The commonality I experienced between the five Caryatids and Buonarroti’s four recumbent tomb figures center on their undefinable qualities of purpose and expression, impossible to relate by use of descriptive words, let alone by way of convoluted theory attempting to pinpoint the nature and source of their aura. I am not quite sure one could do that even at their time of creation since they purposively radiate an elusive nature, more so with Michelangelo’s works.
I vividly recall that as I waltzed dumbstruck from one allegorical personification lying “in state” to another in the Medici Chapel, I believed the artist had given form to something so deeply conceived and obscurely hinted at as “Idea” from within mind and soul that it might only become corporeal in our world by way of an exceptionally talented and educated artist as Michelangelo acting as conductive medium to various modes and forces. A technique of this kind allows for veiled, shadowy conceptualizations to take worldly form as sculpted proxies in our mundane reality appearing by way of a rare genius such as Buonarroti in “translation” as simplified approximations of complex matters far beyond the reach of traditional knowledge.
Michelangelo, therefore, at least in my eye and mind, took up the Herculean labor of making his figures “real” by wielding a hammer and chisel as a baton to both compose and conduct the esoteric “music of the spheres” revealed by contemplating forces both inside and outside of himself and coalescing the discovery into one resonating, holy “chord.” This is the mindful techniquen that breathes “life” into his detailed creations. As an artist, Michelangelo allows intuitive spirit to guide his hand towards the liberation of the figures of Day, Dusk, Dawn and Death from four blocks of inanimate stone.
I imagine that by drawing on a lifelong absorption of seemingly incongruent spheres of study such as philosophic musings on the infinite and eternity, mathematics as perfected reason, poetic musings on love, joy, sorrow, life and death, as well as ubiquitous religious debates of his times on matters of soul, the artist was able to make tangible the unquantifiable spiritual essence that radiates, rather than speaks, its articulation. The four sculptures thus become an expression of everything of vital importance, representative of a unifying, amalgamation of disparate notions. Michelangelo’s orchestrated effort is capped by the effigies’ paradoxical timelessness, as if the Archangel of Life and Death is but the mute overlord director of the adagio movement of a universal Symphony of The Spheres. You might hear and see it all, but only should you dare to imagine it. And to give all four figures such a deeply listless posture is the cherry on the Sunday dessert, imparting the message that the knowing of such matters is an overwhelming, exciting revelation, yet wanly oh-so-very-tiring.
Perhaps the artisans of Athens and the Master of Florence felt a calling to replicate something of the soul that is not of our day-to-day experience, well beyond myth or religiosity. A place of abstract musing on the complexity of unknown states bridging life and death and representative of the region within you and without you where the divine nature of mankind, God, and the gods of the ancients reside in purposeful misted obscurity, luring the beholder towards that place of mind where notions of worldly ideas cease to intrude with their disappointingly mundanely broad tangents that demean the subtly of the knowing.
My words here in these pages are only meant to inspire visitors to Athens and Florence to take the time to take a longer look at these art and architectural treasures as opposed to making a checklist, “drive by” glance at them. Give them the deserved respect of a good think on the viewing. Knowledge of the historical culture of Europe is, of a course, a great plus, but as Bob Dylan sings, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Sometimes one’s own immediate, visceral reaction and individual revelation might find “more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”—or, in this case, “in your art history treatises.”
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* Overview of the history of the Caryatids summarized from online sources including the University of Chicago’s The Caryatids of the Erechtheion (Link: Uchicago.edu – Encyclopaedia Romana – Erechtheion)
