Getty Museum

Anthemion of a Grave Stele

Date

about 320 B.C.

Medium

Marble with polychromy

Culture

Greek (Attic)

Department

Sculpture

Institution

Getty Museum

Greek funerary monuments sometimes consisted of a tall rectangular shaft of marble crowned by an anthemion, a decorative floral element. Early examples of this motif from around 500 B.C. took the form of simple palmettes, but over time the carving became deeper and more ornate. This anthemion is composed of two half palmettes with a long-stemmed flower between them, rising on thick stems from a bed of acanthus leaves. Rosettes decorate the volutes under each palmette. Even the molding separating the anthemion from the stele below is ornately carved with three separate elements. Extravagant crowning ornaments were frequently more elaborate than the figural scenes on the grave markers they surmounted, perhaps because their height made them the most visible part of the monument in increasingly crowded cemeteries. In ancient Greece, cemeteries, which usually lined the roads into a city, were places where the living relatives of the deceased could display their wealth and status, as well as commemorated the dead. Expensive and ornate grave monuments competed with one another for the attention of those passing by. This competitive display grew so extreme that Athens, for example, banned such grave monuments in the late 300s B.C.

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