Narrator: Curator Renee Dreyfus:

Dreyfus: Among the earliest treasures that we have in our Ancient Art collection are these timeless Cycladic figures that you see here.

Narrator: The marble figures were made almost 5000 years ago, on the Cycladic Islands in the Aegean Sea.

Dreyfus: And these figures probably were intended to be fertility figures of some sort. Although we don't know - it's before the time of writing. They represent the human body in its purest, pristine, compact, and essential form.

But at one point they had paint on them and sometimes you can see traces of paint. And if the paint is gone, you can see what is called paint ghosts - the area of the marble that was protected by the color and it is less worn than the surrounding areas that did not have color, so it stands out in high relief. And these paint ghosts reveal that blue was used for eyes, eyebrows, hair, while red dots and stripes in different patterns sometimes appear on the faces of these figures, and perhaps it represents face painting or maybe even tattooing.

Artists like Picasso, Matisse, Brancusi and others were inspired by these figures and even collected them and placed them in their studios as constant reminders of how you could create an emotionally stirring image - yet make it of abstract forms.