The Lady of Elche: history and characteristics of this Iberian sculpture

It has appeared in innumerable publications and is internationally recognized as the "most perfect" sample of autochthonous art from the Iberian Peninsula. It was coveted by the French, who placed it in a place of honor in the Louvre, long before the Lady of Elche returned to Spain. Historians have believed they saw in her a goddess, a priestess and a noblewoman of flesh and blood...

What is, actually, the Lady of Elche? Who is the mysterious woman behind this masterpiece of Iberian art? Why is her finish perfect at the front, while at the back she is only roughly finished and has a deep recess? Did she display herself against a wall? Was it a funerary urn…?

In this article we will try to unravel all the mysteries of this enigmatic lady, although, given the numerous theories about it, this undertaking is still almost an impossible mission.

The Lady of Elche: characteristics of this Iberian masterpiece

We can see it in the National Archaeological Museum (MAN), located in Madrid; a silent witness of a more than enigmatic culture. And it is that, despite the fact that the Iberian culture has left numerous traces in the Iberian Peninsula in the form of sculptures and various elements of daily use, even today it is impossible for us to decipher its mysterious language.

In the 1940s, the archaeologist Manuel Gómez-Moreno (1870-1970) managed to discover the phonetics of some letters of the Iberian alphabet; however, even though we now know how they are pronounced, we still don't know what they mean the words that the ancient settlers of Hispania left on pieces of lead, ceramics or even coins.

This way, the lady who looks at us with an almost haughty expression from her urn in the National Archaeological Museum continues to be a true enigma. Is it a goddess? Her hieratic and majestic expression and her idealized face seem to attest to this. However, the outfit in which she is dressed refers more to a person of flesh and blood, perhaps an aristocratic woman of great importance in Iberian society. There has been no shortage of those who have considered the Lady of Elche a man; specifically, a representation of the god Apollo, as stated by Pedro Ibarra Ruiz in the article that published in the newspaper La Correspondencia de Alicante regarding the discovery of the piece, on August 4 of 1897.

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The discovery of the "Moorish queen"

This is the nickname that the citizens of Elche gave it when the piece came to light, thus relating it to the Arab past of the peninsula. We have to bear in mind that, at the end of the 19th century, studies on Iberian culture were giving its first steps, and the rich cultural heritage hidden in this civilization was still unknown.

In the summer of 1897, a group of farmers who were carrying out their tasks on a farm owned by Dr. Manuel Campello, in Alcudia de Elche, noticed that their tools ran into a hard object. What was his surprise when, going deeper into the earth, they discovered the bust of a beautiful woman, dressed in strange clothes.

Coincidences of life, it turned out that Dr. Campello was a fan of the newly discovered culture Iberian, who already had to his credit other pieces from the period that had previously appeared in his estate. However, the quality of the Lady turned out to be so extraordinary that the news of the discovery spread like wildfire throughout Elche. It seems that Dr. Campello, to satisfy the curiosity of the inhabitants (who wanted to see the "Moorish queen") exhibited her on the balcony of her house, where she could be seen by all.

The Louvre had been searching for and capturing interesting pieces for his collection for years. When the news of the discovery of the Lady reached France, the museum quickly sent the archaeologist and Hispanist Pierre Paris (1859-1931) to Spain to try to get hold of the piece. In those years, Spanish legislation regarding patrimony was quite vague (if not practically non-existent), so Paris managed to take the Lady away in exchange for 4,000 francs. The Louvre had gone ahead of the National Archaeological Museum, whose procedures were going quite slowly, and the Campello family decided to sell the Lady to a safe buyer.

From 1904 to 1941 the sculpture presided over the Iberian art room of the Louvre Museum. It was not until the fall of France into the hands of the Nazis that the piece was able to return to Spain.; the collaborationist Vichy government reached an agreement with Franco to return the precious lady to her place of origin, as proof of "friendship".

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The Lady of Elche: A fake?

The Lady of Elche is a limestone bust of about 56 cm, dated between the 5th and 3rd centuries BC. c. However, not all experts believe in the authenticity of the piece. The American Hispanist John Moffitt (1940-2008) defended until his death the theory that the Lady was a 19th century forgery, made precisely to “sneak” the piece into the Louvre Museum and get a good sum for it. it.

Among the arguments that Moffitt presented to affirm this was the fact that it was practically impossible that the Lady had been buried for more than two millennia just one meter deep in an area of ​​orchards and that no one would have found it with anteriority. What's more, according to the Hispanist, it is hardly credible that in an area of ​​daily work and continuous watering the Lady suffered practically no damage.

In 2005, a research team led by María Pilar Luxán, from the CSIC's Eduardo Torroja Institute of Construction Sciences, managed to date the polychrome pigments of the Lady; these They were dated between the end of the 5th century and the beginning of the 4th century BC. c., which definitively ruled out the theory of forgery.

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Who was the Lady of Elche?

But, although the Luxán team demonstrated that the Lady was an authentic Iberian piece, we still have no certainty about who she was or who she represents. There are various theories about it: a goddess, a priestess, or perhaps simply a noblewoman with a certain status in the community. During the investigation of María Pilar Luxán In addition to the age of the pigments, remains of fragments of calcium and phosphorus were discovered which, according to the team, would belong to bone ash, which would show that the Lady of Elche would have been a funerary urn. This would explain the strange hollowness of her back, which has caused rivers of ink to flow among historians.

Rafael Ramos Fernández (1942-2021), director of the Archaeological and History Museum of Elche and specialist in the Iberian culture of the town, in a article published in the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library (2006), defended the impossibility that the Lady had acted as an urn for ashes. According to Dr. Ramos, the hole in the back of the sculpture lacks the necessary dimensions for this function, and he compared the 2,571 cm3 of the cavity of the Lady of Elche with the 9,316 cm3 of those of the Lady of Baza, another famous Iberian sculpture that is known to have belonged to a tomb and was used funeral.

If the Lady of Elche is a funerary urn, we would be before the representation of an "ideal"; a goddess or a priestess. On the other hand, if the sculpture did not serve as a receptacle for ashes, it could simply be the representation of a woman of high status within the Iberian society.To give the matter more mystery, the bust shows signs of mutilation in its lower part, as if, at first, the Lady had been a full-length sculpture.

Women in Iberian society

The clothing of the Lady of Elche is rich, varied and extraordinarily executed. Carmen María Ruiz Vivas (University of Granada), in her excellent study about the Iberian woman (see bibliography), details the three fundamental stages of the life of any woman in this society, based on the representations that we have arrived. First, we would have the “maiden” stage, in which girls and adolescents would go with their hair uncovered.

This would possibly be one of the indicators that the woman had not yet married. Later, during the second stage (and immediately after the nuptials), the Iberian woman would cover her hair with a kind of cap. And, finally, the third stage would be that of maturity, which would coincide with a greater weight of women in society. In this last stage we would include the so-called “Ladies”, like the one from Elche, representations of women with a certain power in the community, veiled and with a profusion of jewels.

The high status of the Iberian woman in her maturity period is linked to the theory that the Lady of Elche may represent a priestess.. In a silver seal-ring found in Santiago de la Espada (Jaén), you can see a woman with a scrolled hairstyle very similar to the one worn by the Lady of Elche. For Ruiz Vivas, this is a possible testimony that a female priesthood did exist in the Iberian culture, so we could not rule out that the Lady belonged to the priestly caste.

Until now, the identity of the Lady of Elche continues to resist. For the moment, we will have to settle for letting her imagination run wild and delighting in her splendid beauty, as she gazes at us from her urn in the Archaeological Museum of Madrid.