The Archaic marble statue of a young woman wearing a peplos is the Peplos Kore.
Created around 530 BCE, the 118-centimetre statue was carved from fine-grained Parian marble and found on the Acropolis of Athens in three pieces during an 1886 excavation. It is now displayed in the Acropolis Museum.
“Kore” means a young woman or maiden, the female counterpart to the male kouros. The statue’s name refers to the peplos, a woollen Greek garment that scholars once thought she wore. Modern study suggests the clothing may instead be an Anatolian-style dress with a cape, so the traditional name is useful but not completely certain.
A common mix-up is treating every kore as an identifiable portrait. Korai were often votive figures or grave monuments, and the Peplos Kore’s unusual pose and numerous attachment holes have led some scholars to propose that she represented a goddess. Traces of paint also remind us that Greek marble sculpture was originally vividly coloured, not uniformly white.