Because one of the photos from the “Winter in the park” series has raised some questions I decided to show the entire work of art that contains that statue, work that was clipped by my framing. The ensemble is called “The Alley of the Cariatides” by Constatin Baraschi (November 17, 1902 – March 22, 1966) and consists of two strings of 10 statues on each side of the alley. The statues represent Romanian peasant women, dressed in traditional clothing and carrying an amphora on their heads. There are two types of statues and they are differentiated by the position of their hands. The work was unveiled in 1936 but what we see today is not the original, which was destroyed during communism to make space for a statue of Stalin, but a reconstruction done in 2005 using the original molds. I don’t know how correct this information is but I’ve also read on the web that “The Alley of the Cariatides” caused quite a stir when it was originally unveiled, stir determined by two facts: first, that this was a classical arrangement but the subjects were peasants and second, the fact that the peasants were barefoot.
