Woman hugging her feet in Cycladic art

Cycladic art is the name given to the marble figurines produced in the Cyclades islands during the third millennium BCE — small, severely simplified human forms with folded arms and tilted heads, mostly female, mostly buried with the dead. Their austere geometry would astonish twentieth-century modernists from Brancusi to Modigliani, who studied them as precursors to abstract sculpture. The seated figure embracing her own feet is one of the rarer poses in the corpus, dating from the late Early Cycladic phase, and exemplifies the meditative reduction that gives Cycladic art its quiet power.