The 'Critian Boy'. Marble statue (height 85cm) found on the Athenian Acropolis with debris from the Persian attack of
480/79 B.C. The earliest near-complete example surviving of the new style which breaks with the rigidity of the Archaic
kouroi and shows the weight of the body shifted on to one leg, with the corresponding adjustment of hips and shoulders -
trivial features, but a landmark in the history of western art.
Athens was the home of the best black-figure, and the inventor of red-figure, vase-painting. Its sculpture was of high quality
and more familiar to us through the Attic practice of using kouroi and relief gravestones in their cemeteries, and through
their burial of the overthrown marble monuments of the Acropolis after the Persian sacks of 480/79. Among these
sculptures is one which vividly demonstrates the sculptural revolution which had already taken place and which the vase-
painters had presaged. The 'Kritian boy' has abandoned the four-square stance of a kouros. He stands in a natural, relaxed
posture, weight mainly on one leg, his hips, trunk, and shoulders shifting to adjust to the stance. This is a vital novelty in the
history of ancient art - life deliberately observed, understood, and copied. After him all becomes possible.
The Classical Style
The sculptor's new understanding of what he could achieve once he had decided to look, continued to be expressed in the
standing male, and the succession is clear, from the early Classical Apollos, to Polyclitus' Doryphorus, and, in the fourth
century, Lysippus' athlete Apoxyomenus. These were still commemorative statues, not (as the Archaic kouroi had been) to
mark a tomb or serve a sanctuary, but more explicitly of individuals - athletes or warriors - to be dedicated for success in
games or under arms, or more self-consciously (as by Polyclitus) to demonstrate proportions and technique. Progress was
slow but certain in rendering the effect on the body of a shift in its weight and balance, or of partly resting on a separate