La Belle Endormie. Une divinité funéraire de Cyrénaïque saisie à New York

A new Cyrenaican funerary divinity, or ‘mourning woman’, was officially seized in December 2019, after it was identified following its appearance on the art market. This article will not discuss the illicit traffic of antiquities from Cyrenaica, but will instead focus on the sculpture itself, nicknamed ‘Sleeping Beauty’, because of images showing it lying down and wrapped in a blanket. This sculpture is an extraordinary example of a very rare subtype of half-veiled heads among a very common and ‘canonic’ group of half-statues formed of hundreds of other pieces. It is a testimony of an attempt to merge the two main and opposite traditions inside this category, in which heads were sculpted with or without faces.