Relief with Orestes and Clytemnestra

550–525 B.C.

Medium

Terracotta

Dimensions

26.4 × 35.5 cm

Status

In Museum Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-190465

The relief depicts a nude male in profile, walking toward the right, with his left leg striding forward; he has seized the hair of the central female figure with his left hand; his right arm, now missing, would have been extending forward in order to strike her with a weapon. The female figure twists slightly. She wears a long chiton that extends down to her feet; her head is slightly tilted to the proper right. Her hair is brushed over her forehead in wavy-edged locks with no part in the middle and hangs down on either side, forming three braids. Her face is oval in shape and her large almond-shaped eyes protrude, with no distinction between the eyeball and the eyelids. A third figure, of which only the feet, the edge of a long garment, and the outline of the lower body survive, steps forward with the right leg and is a witness to the scene. The relief is framed, at the base and at the top, by fillets supported on each side by a perpendicular element. Due to a number of iconographic elements, the scene can be interpreted as Orestes killing his mother, Clytemnestra, in revenge for her murder of Orestes’s father, Agamemnon. The third figure may be Elektra, Orestes’s sister.