Eirene and Ploutos

This statue once stood on a market square. The Athenians set it up to mark their peace with Sparta in the 370s BCE and the newly instituted state cult of Eirene.

Its chief interest is that Kephisodotos, the sculptor, introduced a new concept for a statuary group.

Eirene with Ploutos is the first prototype of a pairing that later European art would repeat in countless variants — the Madonna and Child.

The way Eirene inclines her head toward the child, and the way he tenderly reaches for her face, point to a new idea of constructing a group on an inner spiritual bond, a dialogue of feeling.

Later, along this same new path of lyrical, intimate motifs — previously unknown to Greek sculpture — went Kephisodotos’s probable son, Praxiteles. Less than half a century later he refined the approach in his Hermes with the Infant Dionysus.