Cycladic marble figurines have generated so much interest that they have become the focus of a separate field of enquiry within Aegean art. This inflated interest is relatively recent: few marble figures were known before the end of the nineteenth century; the first museum acquisitions (British Museum, Dresden, and Karlsruhe) date from the 1840s, and we have to wait until the explorations of the English traveller James Theodore Bent in 1883–4 for a renewed interest (J. Bent, JHS 5, 1884, 42–59). They are first mentioned in studies of Greek sculpture from this period, and are thought of, in comparison to Classical art, as ‘primitive’. For Collignon, ‘these first attempts at sculpture take us back to a distant time when barbarism still held sway in the lands that will one day be Greece.