[4] The statue has the compact and robust structure which is typical of this period in Attica and goes back to the Berlin Goddess (Pergamon Museum SK 1800, first quarter of the sixth century).

In sculpture and Attic black figure pottery, contemporary women wear the sleeveless Doric peplos over a light chiton and the himation, when it is present at all, is pinned at both shoulders.

Another stylistic element of the Kore of Lyons is the curve of the himation above the buttocks which is not subsequently imitated by Attic sculptors, but is fairly frequent in contemporary vase painting and marble sculpture of the Greek East.

[4] However, according to some stylistic and technical criteria, the statue belongs to Attic sculpture of the Archaic period (thick hair, receding chin, almond shaped eyes) while undergoing Ionian influence (chiselled rounding, softened facial lines) which increased at the end of the sixth century.

Its hesitant proportions, the stiff awkward robustness and the non-realistic details allow the statue to be dated to the "mature" Archaic period, around 550-540 BC.

[4] The question of the architectural function of the Kore of Lyons was solved by Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway in 1986; the upper part of the polos has some characteristics typical of caryatids, which Payne did not observe directly, but only through casts sent to Athens.

Another element supporting this conclusion is the reversal of the diagonal himation (going over the left rather than the more usual right shoulder) which is typical of mirrored pairs rather than isolated works.

It is possible that it was brought back by a seventeenth century aristocrat on the Grand Tour,[6] the voyage taken by young gentlemen of the upper classes of European society in order to complete their education, then based on the study of Greek and Latin.

Among various undocumented owners of the kore, it seems, according to Henri Lechat, to have been part of the collection Tempier of Nîmes, sold by a Lyonese antiquities dealer named Mercier in December 1810 for the nascent local museum.

These elements were removed according to "a museological principle that desired, for the sake of archaeological and scientific truth, only to display the true material of what was possessed, without use of representational devices, such as completing the sculpture with other materials, plaster in this case, as if this plaster was a precise substitute for truth"[7] as Professor Jean-Claude Mossière, associate member for the study of ancient and contemporary Greece at the French School at Athens put it.

Unlike the Musée de Lyon, the Acropolis Museum has chosen to continue to present the fragments it possesses with a plaster cast of the upper portion.