The starting point: a youth standing to attention
In the seventh century BCE Greek sculptors began carving large figures in marble, with Egyptian statues as their model. For more than a century they repeated two types: the kouros, a naked standing youth, and the kore, a young woman in a long dress. Both stand straight, weight on both feet, arms close to the body, so every kouros looks as if he were standing to attention. They were painted, too: the Peplos Kore from the Acropolis (about 530 BCE) still has traces of red on her lips and eyes.
Inside that fixed pose the body slowly became more natural. By about 500 BCE the kouros of Aristodikos, the last of the series, has the anatomy of a real young man, though he still stands the old way.
One leg relaxed: the turn of 480 BCE
The break comes with a marble youth found on the Acropolis, the Kritios Boy, made after 480 BCE. He rests his weight on his left leg and lets the right one go loose, bent at the knee. It sounds like nothing, yet it is the pose you take without thinking when you wait in a queue, and no kouros had ever done it. Art historians call this stance contrapposto, Italian for “set against”, because one side of the body answers the other.
The Kritios Boy is the model of what art historians call the Severe Style, the art of the first decades after the Persian Wars. Its masterpiece in bronze is the Charioteer of Delphi (478-474 BCE), 1.82 metres tall, found north of the temple of Apollo. He commemorates a victory in the Pythian Games, the athletic festival held at Delphi.
Why bronze, and why so little of it?
In the fifth century bronze became the preferred material for freestanding statues. A hollow bronze figure is much lighter than a marble one of the same size and can hold poses that would snap a stone arm, such as the god from Artemision (about 460 BCE), 2.09 metres tall, who stretches one arm forward and raises the other to throw.
The trouble is that very few bronze originals of the fifth century survive. Several of the best came out of the sea, like the god of Artemision or the youth recovered from the shipwreck of Antikythera (340-330 BCE, 1.94 metres). What we know of the famous works comes mainly from ancient writers and from later Roman copies in marble. Take the Diadoumenos of Polykleitos, a youth tying a band round his head (the name means just that): the bronze original is lost, but a marble copy made around 100 BCE and found on Delos survives in Athens, 1.95 metres tall. The copyist added a tree trunk beside the leg, because marble cannot stand on two thin ankles the way bronze can.
Gods, athletes and the people around them
What did Greek sculptors represent? Gods first of all, recognisable by what they carry: a thunderbolt for Zeus, a trident for Poseidon, a spear for Athena, as on the Athena statues of the Acropolis. Then athletes, because a victory at the great games was worth a statue in the sanctuary, set up as a gift to the god. Then the dead, on grave reliefs that show families together.
In the fourth century, the Late Classical period, sculptors went on refining that Classical body, as the Antikythera youth shows. After the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE, the subjects widen.
Drama, age and suffering in the Hellenistic period
The Hellenistic sculptors (323-31 BCE) worked for kings and cities spread from Greece to Egypt and the Near East, and they looked at everyone. Children, old people and grotesques appear next to gods and heroes, and bodies twist while faces show pain.
The most famous example is the Laocoön, the Trojan priest and his two sons crushed by serpents, found in Rome in 1506. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century CE, named sculptors from Rhodes as its makers. The Vatican Museums date the group to around 40-20 BCE, the very end of the Hellenistic age, though the date is still argued over.
So how did the body learn to move? In three steps: first it stood straight in marble, then it shifted its weight and moved into bronze, and finally it turned, fought and suffered.
Where to see it
The National Archaeological Museum in Athens has the god of Artemision, the Antikythera youth and the Diadoumenos of Delos in one building, and the Acropolis Museum has the korai and the Kritios Boy. The Charioteer is in the museum at Delphi, and the Laocoön in the Vatican Museums. Check opening times on the official websites before you go.
Sources
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: “Greek Art in the Archaic Period” (2003); “The Art of Classical Greece (ca. 480-323 B.C.)” (2008); “Art of the Hellenistic Age and the Hellenistic Tradition”.
- Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, Odysseus: Artemision bronze (NAM Χ15161), Charioteer of Delphi, youth from Antikythera (NAM Χ13396), Diadoumenos of Delos (NAM 1826), Aristodikos (NAM 3938).
- Acropolis Museum, Athens: Peplos Kore (Acr. 679), Kritios Boy (Acr. 698), Athena statues.
- Musei Vaticani, “Laocoonte”, Museo Pio-Clementino.
- Pliny the Elder, Natural History 36.37.
