Кариатида

Around 1911 Modigliani had all but given up painting. He was carving stone instead, trading ideas with the sculptor Brancusi and studying the African and Khmer carvings then arriving in Paris, and he dreamed of a whole temple crowned with caryatids, the standing female figures that ancient architects used in place of columns. He drew dozens of them and painted a few, like this one, where the body bends under an invisible weight and the outline matters more than the flesh. The sculpture plan came to little. He had almost no money for stone and the dust was bad for his weak lungs, so within a couple of years he returned to paint. The elongated, mask-like faces of his later portraits still carry the look of these carved figures.