caryatid

The single square column features crouching figures in the capital who seem to be holding up the arch, a playful evocation of the classical figure of the caryatid or herm.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 21, 2026

In ancient Greece, the culture where male athletes were so highly prized as heroic citizens, a caryatid was a draped female figure used instead of a column as an architectural support.

From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 15, 2023

And there's Salma Hayek in her clinking lavender gown, gliding through like a Technicolor caryatid.

From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 6, 2018

You may think that David Cameron's well-heeled colleagues would give him a marble caryatid bought from the Frieze Masters art fair for his birthday.

From The Guardian ● Oct. 12, 2012

“A caryatid wouldn’t be strong enough for Dad.”

From "The Glass Castle" by Jeannette Walls

We can still contemplate in the court of the Louvre, in the pavilion of the Horloge, those caryatides of Sarazin at once so majestic and so graceful, which are detached with admirable relief and lightness.

From Lectures on the true, the beautiful and the good by Victor Cousin

Soon she had made friends with the heroes and heroines that are the caryatides of the book-shelves.

From Eden An Episode by Edgar Saltus

But such sustaining power, so applied, is like figures of caryatides supporting some poor decadent frieze.

From The Galaxy, June 1877 Vol. XXIII.—June, 1877.—No. 6. by Various

Moving up the streets, in dust and mud-puddle, you see shabbily ambitious churches, with wooden towers; hotels, the curbs whereof are speckled with human blemishes, sustaining like hip-shotten caryatides the sandstone-wooden columns.

From Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, and His Romaunt Abroad During the War by George Alfred Townsend

Sometimes these images were placed on the walls and used as caryatides.

From Religion and Lust or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire by James Weir

Flanking the Hunt likeness, the delayed but imposing 6-foot-3-inch draped caryatids represent both “Architecture” and “Painting and Sculpture.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● May 8, 2026

In it, she and Cardi B dress in Grecian goddess-inspired dresses, dance in front of classically inspired statuary, wear headdresses that evoke caryatids and transform into Grecian vases.

From Salon ● Sep. 4, 2021

He sat in a ostentatious Greek-style hall bedecked with four caryatids, the draped female figures used in columns — a style first seen in Delphi 2 ½ millennia ago.

From Washington Post ● Dec. 12, 2019

A dozen caryatids - sculpted female figures which had helped support one of the building's domed roofs - were carefully lowered.

From BBC ● Jan. 27, 2016

Small kids were perched on tabletops because there weren't enough chairs, and the Epiphany sixth graders stood like caryatids leaning against three of the four walls of the room.

From "The View From Saturday" by E.L. Konigsburg