Lady of Elche
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The famous but controversial "Lady of Elche" or Dama de Elche (the National Archaeological Museum of Madrid calls her "enigmática"), is a polychrome stone bust that was revealed as found by chance in 1897 at La Alcudia, an archaeological site that was on a private estate about 2 km, south of Elche (Catalan Elx) (Alicante, Autonomous Community of Valencia, Spain). The Lady of Elche is generally believed to be Iberian art of the 4th century B.C., or of the Hellenistic or the Roman periods.
The bust is usually thought to represent a woman wearing a very complex headdress and big coils on each side of the face. A minority interpretation sees it representing a man.
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History
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The sculpture was found August 4, 1897, by a young worker, Manuel Campello Esclapez. Pierre Paris, a French archaeological connoisseur, purchased the sculpture within a few weeks and shipped it to France, where it was shown at the Louvre Museum and hidden for safe-keeping during World War II. The Vichy government negotiated its return to Franco's Spain in 1940 - 41, and June 27, 1941 the sculpture was placed in Museo del Prado (Madrid), then moved to Madrid's National Archeological Museum, where it remains, in spite of appeals to return it to its home town, where it is represented by a reproduction.
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The Lady of Elche initiated a popular interest in pre-Roman Iberian culture. She appeared on a 1948 Spanish one-peseta banknote (illustration, right) and was mentioned in William Gaddis's The Recognitions (1955).
Manuel Martinez Macia, an enthusiastic promoter of the Lady of Elche, has founded the Orden de la Dama de Elche to return her to Valencia.
The statues of the seated Lady of Baza and the Bicha de Balazote are exhibited in the same room of the museum.
Forgery suspicions
One theory holds that the Lady of Elche is a modern artifact, an Art Nouveau forgery showing the influence of Alphonse Mucha's posters.
Reference
- John F. Moffitt, Art Forgery: The Case of the Lady of Elche, University Press of Florida Gainesville, 1995
External links
- Earnest plea to return the Lady of Elche (http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/esanchez/dama.htm)
- Art and ethnographic forgeries (http://www.caslon.com.au/forgeryprofile4.htm)
- University of Alicante, Fundacion La Alcudia (http://www.ua.es/alcudia/):
- Reflections on the Lady of Elche (http://www.ffil.uam.es/reib/manolo.htm) (in Spanish)
- Article (http://enciclopedia.us.es/index.php/Dama_de_Elche) at Enciclopedia Librees:Dama de Elche