CANEPHORAE, "basket-bearers," the title given of old to Athenian maidens of noble family, annually chosen to carry on their heads baskets with sacrificial implements and apparatus at the Panathenaic and other festivals. The term, also in the form of canephores, is applied, in architecture, to figures of both sexes which carry laden baskets on their heads or shoulders. They are sometimes used structurally as caryatides (q.v.), and sometimes decoratively as in many of the Renaissance Italian villas.