The exhibition was born from the loan of a marble idol granted by the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens following the Sicily-Greece agreement that brought the "Kouros found" into the great exhibition in Athens last September. Kallos.

Through the exhibition, the Archaeological and Landscape Park of Syracuse, Eloro, Villa del Tellaro and Akrai, directed by Carlo Staffile, wanted to enhance the meaning and essentiality of the traits of the marble idol of the Spedos variety, dated to the Ancient Cycladic ( 2800-2300 BC), putting it in dialogue with an installation by the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos and with other works exhibited in the Syracuse museum which, despite being chronologically distant, show a common denominator with the symbolic values of the Cycladic statue, or its representation feminine, beauty and symbolic and almost otherworldly meaning.

The Spedos figurines to which the statue on display belongs are slender elongated female forms with bent arms, with a characteristic U-shaped head and a deeply engraved split between the legs; the statues of this type, all female, with the exception of one, range from miniature examples, a few centimeters high, to much larger sculptures, such as the one that will be exhibited in Syracuse, about 70 cm high.

The Cycladic statue has a very modern shape, with harmonic features and an absolutely contemporary trait. A real jewel of ancient art.

The exhibition aims to combine the classicism of the Greek idol with the modernity of the large environmental installation "Crowned Idols" by Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos in which the female figure, the way she is perceived, her role and her relationship to society, it is placed at the center of artistic reflection. The association with the Idol from Greece starts from the consideration that Cycladic art, which we are led to identify with essential and stylized representations close to the taste of modernist sculpture, places a female figure at its center.

For the installation of the Paolo Orsi Archaeological Museum, the artist took into account the circular shape of the exhibition space, presenting and crowning, with a different formal balance, another female figure, this time represented by the Cycladic Idol. The work on display, “Crown”, was exhibited for the first time in London in 2012 on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

The common thread between the Cycladic work, the Greek colonial and Christian art, lies precisely in the continuity of the symbol - woman, divinity, nature: Demeter and Kore, the Nymphs and the Paleochristian Saints constitute the derived figures resulting from the Cycladic figurative organicity .