Caryatid

He stated in his 1st century BC work De architectura (I.1.5) that certain female figures represented the punishment of the women of Caryae, a town near Sparta in Laconia, who were condemned to slavery after betraying Athens by siding with Persia in the Greco-Persian Wars.

Lefkowitz says that the term comes from the Spartan city of Caryae, where young women did a ring dance around an open-air statue of the goddess Artemis, locally identified with a walnut tree.

[citation needed] A caryatid supporting a basket on her head is called a canephora ("basket-bearer"), representing one of the maidens who carried sacred objects used at feasts of the goddesses Athena and Artemis.

However, their use as supports in the form of women can be traced back even earlier, to ritual basins, ivory mirror handles from Phoenicia, and draped figures from archaic Greece.

One of those original six figures, removed by Lord Elgin in the early 19th century in an act which severely damaged the temple and is widely considered to be vandalism and looting, is currently in the British Museum in London.

The Greek government does not recognise the British Museum's claims to own any part of the Acropolis temples and the return of the stolen Caryatid to Athens along with the rest of the so-called Elgin Marbles is the subject of a major international campaign.

Early interior examples are the figures of Heracles and Iole carved on the jambs of a monumental fireplace in the Sala della Jole of the Doge's Palace, Venice, about 1450.

[11] In the following century Jacopo Sansovino, both sculptor and architect, carved a pair of female figures supporting the shelf of a marble chimneypiece at Villa Garzoni, near Padua.

Those in the apartments of princes and important personages, he considered, might be grand enough for chimneypieces with caryatid supporters, such as one he illustrated and a similar one he installed in the Sala dell'Anticollegio, also in the Doge's Palace.

Robert Heinlein described this piece in Stranger in a Strange Land: "Now here we have another emotional symbol... for almost three thousand years or longer, architects have designed buildings with columns shaped as female figures... After all those centuries it took Rodin to see that this was work too heavy for a girl...