Lady of Baza
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Dama_de_Baza_ampliada.jpg
The Lady of Baza ("la Dama de Baza") is a famous example of Celtiberian art, an early Iberian female figure with traces of painted detail, found at Baza, in the altiplano, the high tableland in the northwest of the province of Granada. Baza is the site of the Ibero-Roman city of Basti and, in one of its two necropolis, the Lady of Baza was recovered. She is seated in an armchair, and a space within her back is thought to have contained the ashes of a cremation.
The sculpture has been given a journalistic name that links it in the popular imagination to its more famous cousin, the "Lady of Elche". Even more than the Lady of Elche, the sculpture became for a while a ludibrium in the internal cultural politics of Spain, where "regionalists" combat the "implacable centralism" of the capital and the artistic bureaucracy that retains some vestiges of the cultural outlook of Franco's regime. After conservation in Madrid, the sculpture, dated to the 4th century BCE, joined the enigmatic Lady of Elche deposited in the Museo Arqueológico Nacional at the National Library in Madrid, in spite of the continuing agitation to return it to Granada. The chimera Bicha de Balazote is exhibited in the same museum room.
See also the "Dama del Cerro de los Santos."
External links
- Francisco Umbral, "The Lady of Baza: Spanish artistic centralism" (http://www.ogoino.com/lit/eng/francisco.html): a Spanish novelist wittily calls for the return of the sculpture, in a 1973 essay from his Diary of a Snob (English)
- Illustration of the Lady of Baza (http://www.geocities.com/caniles_granada/webenglish/history.html)
- Article (http://enciclopedia.us.es/index.php/Dama_de_Baza) at Enciclopedia Librees:Dama de Baza