Standing Caryatid

Around 1913 Modigliani did not really think of himself as a painter at all. He wanted to be a sculptor, and for years he had been drawing caryatids, the female figures that classical builders used as living columns. He called them his columns of tenderness and dreamed of setting a whole row of them into an imaginary temple of beauty. In the spring of 1913 he even travelled to the marble quarries of Carrara to begin. Then the dream collapsed. Stone dust worsened his weak lungs and he could not afford the marble, so he gave up carving around 1915 and turned back to painting. In the end he finished only one caryatid in stone. The rest survive as drawings and a handful of oils like this one.