How to recognise a kouros
For more than a century Greek sculptors repeated the same formula, so a kouros is easy to recognise. Check these points:
- Pose: the figure stands frontally, with restricted movement.
- Arms: they hang down at the sides of the body.
- Feet: the left foot is slightly advanced.
- Body: the youth is usually naked, with the muscles carefully modelled; a few wore painted sandals, like the giant kouros of Sounion.
- Face: kouroi and their female counterparts, the korai, all smile, with the so-called Archaic smile.
Exceptions prove the rule: in Athens one kouros found in the bed of the river Ilissos is clothed, the only one of its kind in the collection of the National Archaeological Museum.
Where the pose came from
Egypt. The New York Kouros, made around 590-580 BCE, is one of the earliest marble statues of a human figure carved in Attica, and its rigid pose, left leg forward and arms falling at the sides, derives from Egyptian statuary. Greek sculptors kept that clear, simple scheme throughout the sixth century BCE. In this early figure the forms are geometric, almost abstract, and the anatomy is drawn in elegant, regular lines. Over the following generations sculptors kept the pose and changed the body, which is the story of Archaic Greek sculpture.
What were kouroi for?
A kouros stood in one of two places. On a grave, it was the sema, the grave marker: the New York Kouros stood on the tomb of a young Athenian aristocrat, and the verse on the base of Kroisos names a young man who died in battle. A few kouroi stood on bases carved with sport scenes, which may have marked the graves of athletes.
In a sanctuary, a kouros was a gift to a god. The people of Argos dedicated the twin kouroi known as Kleobis and Biton to Apollo at Delphi; the giants of Sounion belonged to Poseidon; another kouros comes from the sanctuary of Apollo on Mount Ptoon in Boeotia. Sizes vary a lot, from 1.36 metres at Ptoon to 3.05 metres at Sounion. Were they portraits? No: the face and body are ideal, the same type for every dead youth or every offering, and the name, when there is one, comes from an inscription.
How the type ended
By about 500 BCE the kouros of Aristodikos, the latest in the Athens collection, still stands in the old pose. Soon after 480 BCE a marble youth from the Acropolis, the Kritios Boy, finally breaks the rule: he rests his weight on one leg and relaxes the other, the stance later called contrapposto. With that, the Archaic formula is over.
The word, though, survived. In 1944-45 the American sculptor Isamu Noguchi made a Kouros almost three metres tall from interlocking slabs of pink and grey marble, held together only by their own weight. He wrote to the Metropolitan Museum that his figure went back to his student memories of a kouros the museum had acquired.
Where to see them
The National Archaeological Museum in Athens has the largest series, from the Sounion giant (Room 8) to Kroisos and Aristodikos (Room 13). Kleobis and Biton are in the museum at Delphi, and the New York Kouros is in Gallery 154 of the Metropolitan Museum; Noguchi’s Kouros belongs to the Met’s modern collection and is not always on view. Check before you go.
Sources
- National Archaeological Museum, Athens, “Sculpture Collection”.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection records 32.11.1 (kouros) and 53.87a-i (Isamu Noguchi, Kouros); “Greek Art in the Archaic Period” (2003).
- Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, Odysseus: Sounion kouros (2720), Kleobis and Biton (Delphi 467, 1524), Aristodikos (3938), kouros from Ptoon.
- Acropolis Museum, Athens, “Kritios Boy” (Acr. 698).
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