Lady of Elche

The famous but controversial "Lady of Elche" (the Museo Arqueológico Nacional, Madrid, calls her "enigmática"), is a polychrome stone bust that was revealed as found by chance in 1897 at La Alcudia, an archaeological site that was on a private estate about 2 km, south of Elche (Catalan Elx) (Alicante, Autonomous Community of Valencia, Spain). The Lady of Elche is either Iberian art of the 4th century B.C., or of the Hellenistic or the Roman periods or she is an Art Nouveau forgery showing the influence of Alphonse Mucha's posters.

The bust is usually thought to represent a woman wearing a very complex headdress and big coils on each side of the face that remind some viewers of Ozma of Oz. A minoritary interpretation has it representing a man. She has appears on a 1948 Spanish one-peseta banknote illustration needed

The sculpture was found August 4, 1897, by a young worker, Manuel Campello Esclapez. Pierre Paris, a French archaeological connoisseur, purchased the sculpture within a few weeks and shipped it to France, where it was shown at the Louvre Museum and hidden for safe-keeping during World War II. The Vichy government negotiated its return to Franco's Spain in 1940 - 41, and June 27, 1941 the sculpture was placed in Museo del Prado (Madrid), then moved to Madrid's National Archeological Museum, where it remains, in spite of appeals to return it to its home town, where it is represented by a reproduction.

Real or not, the Lady of Elche initiated a popular interest in pre-Roman Iberian culture. She even gets a notice in William Gaddis's The Recognitions (1955).

Manuel Martinez Macia, the enthusiastic promoter of the Lady of Elche, has founded the Orden de la Dama de Elche to bring her home again.

The statues of the seated Lady of Baza and the Bicha de Balazote are exhibited in the same room of the museum.

Reference

John F. Moffitt, Art Forgery: The Case of the Lady of Elche, University Press of Florida Gainesville, 1995

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