She is just 118 centimeters tall, carved from fine-grained marble quarried on the island of Paros, and she belongs to a beloved type of Archaic Greek sculpture called the kore, meaning a young woman. Korai stand upright and face forward, often holding an offering, mirror images of their nude male counterparts, the kouroi. What makes them unforgettable is the so-called archaic smile, a faint upward curve of the lips that plays across the faces of statues from this period. On the Peplos Kore it reads as gentle, knowing, almost private. Yet she breaks the mold in subtle ways: her head tilts slightly, and her weight shifts to one leg rather than standing rigidly square. Small as it sounds, that hint of natural movement points toward the revolution in realism that Greek sculpture was about to undergo.

The statue owes her name to a wardrobe error. When she was found, scholars assumed she wore a peplos, the simple draped wool gown favored by Archaic Greek women, and the label stuck. Modern researchers mostly reject that reading. Her dress is more likely an Anatolian-style long garment with a cape draped over it, a richer and more exotic costume than a plain peplos. So the most famous example of a peplos-clad statue is, in all likelihood, not wearing one at all. It is the kind of irony that keeps art historians humble, and a reminder that the names we give the past often reveal more about us than about the thing itself.

Who was she meant to be? For a long time korai were read as votive figures, offerings left on the Acropolis in place of the worshippers themselves, or as grave markers for the dead, as with the famous Phrasikleia Kore. But the Peplos Kore stands apart. The archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann argues that this type does not depict mortal girls at all, but goddesses. The clues are physical: thirty-five bore holes ring her head in two rows, and another pierces her right hand. These suggest she once wore a rayed crown or a helmet and gripped attributes such as a bow, arrows, or a shield. Reconstructions have presented her variously as Athena or Artemis, divine rather than human, armed rather than demure. The serene girl, it turns out, may be a deity in disguise.

She emerged from the earth in three pieces during an 1886 excavation northwest of the Erechtheion on the Acropolis, and is attributed to an anonymous artist known only as the Rampin Master, named for a related head now in the Louvre. Her left arm, carved separately, was lost long ago. Her most important modern role, though, has been to overturn a myth. In 1975 the Museum of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge painted a cast of the statue and set it beside a plain white one, a startling demonstration that ancient sculpture was anything but colorless. She later starred in the touring Gods in Colour exhibition, whose bold reconstructions forced the public to imagine the ancient world as its makers actually saw it: bright, painted, and alive.