Statuary
According to one Greek writer, Daedalus used the same composi-
tional patterns for his statues as the Egyptians used for theirs, and
the first truly monumental stone statues of the Greeks follow very
closely the canonical Egyptian format.
NEW YORK KOUROSOne of the earliest examples (FIG. 5-8)
of life-size statuary in Greece is the marble kouros (“youth”; plural,
kouroi) now in New York. The Greek kouros emulates the stance ofEgyptian statues (FIG. 3-13). In both Egypt and Greece, the figure is
rigidly frontal with the left foot advanced slightly. The arms are held
beside the body, and the fists are clenched with the thumbs forward.
The New York kouros, like most Egyptian statues, was also a funer-
ary statue. It stood over a grave in the countryside somewhere near
Athens. Statues like this one replaced the huge vases (FIG. 5-2) of
Geometric times as the preferred form of grave marker in the sixth
centuryBCE. The Greeks also used kouroi as votive offerings in sanc-
tuaries. The kouros type, because of its generic quality, could be em-
ployed in several different contexts.
Despite the adherence to Egyptian prototypes, Greek kouros
statues differ from their models in two important ways. First, the
Greek sculptors liberated them from their original stone block. The
Egyptian obsession with permanence was alien to the Greeks, who
were preoccupied with finding ways to represent motion rather than
stability in their sculpted figures. Second, the kouroi are nude, and
in the absence of identifying attributes, they, like the bronze stat-
uette (FIG. 5-4) Mantiklos dedicated, are formally indistinguishable
from Greek images of deities with their perfect bodies exposed for
all to see.
The New York kouros shares many traits with the Mantiklos
Apollo and other Orientalizing works such as the Lady of Auxerre
(FIG. 5-7), especially the triangular shape of head and hair and the
flatness of the face—the hallmarks of the Daedalic style. Eyes, nose,
and mouth all sit on the front of the head, and the ears on the sides.
The long hair forms a flat backdrop behind the head. The placement
of the various anatomical parts is the result of the sculptor’s having
drawn these features on four independent sides of the marble block,
following the same workshop procedure used in Egypt for millen-
nia. The New York kouros also has the slim waist of earlier Greek
statues and exhibits the same love of pattern. The pointed arch of the
rib cage, for example, echoes the V-shaped ridge of the hips, which
suggests but does not accurately reproduce the rounded flesh and
muscle of the human body.CALF BEARER A generation later than the New York kouros is
the statue (FIG. 5-9) of a moschophoros,or calf bearer, found in frag-
ments on the Athenian Acropolis. Its inscribed base (not visible in
the photograph) states that a man named Rhonbos dedicated the
statue. Rhonbos is almost certainly the calf bearer himself, bringing
an offering to Athena in thanksgiving for his prosperity. He stands in
the left-foot-forward manner of the kouroi, but he has a beard and
therefore is no longer a youth. He wears a thin cloak (once painted to
set it off from the otherwise nude body). No one dressed this way in
ancient Athens. The sculptor adhered to the artistic convention of
male nudity and attributed to the calf bearer the noble perfection
that nudity suggests while also indicating that this mature gentle-
man is clothed, as any respectable citizen would be in this context.
The Archaic sculptor’s love of pattern may be seen once again in the
handling of the difficult problem of representing man and animal
together. The calf ’s legs and the moschophoros’s arms form a bold X
that unites the two bodies both physically and formally.
The calf bearer’s face differs markedly from those of earlier
Greek statues (and those of Egypt and the Near East) in one notable
way. The man smiles—or at least seems to. From this time on, Ar-
chaic Greek statues always smile, even in the most inappropriate
contexts (see, for example,FIG. 5-28,where a dying warrior with an
arrow piercing his chest grins broadly at the spectator). This so-
called Archaic smile has been variously interpreted, but it is not to be
taken literally. Rather, the smile seems to be the Archaic sculptor’s
way of indicating that the person portrayed is alive. By adopting this5-8Kouros, ca. 600 bce.Marble, 6–^12 high. Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York.
The sculptors of the earliest life-size statues of kouroi (young men)
adopted the Egyptian pose for standing figures (FIG. 3-13), but the
kouroi are nude and liberated from the original block of stone.106 Chapter 5 ANCIENT GREECE1 ft.