The New York Kouros at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nov. 2006

Kouros
Marble, Greek, Attic, ca. 590-580 B.C.
Fletcher Fund, 1932 (32.11.1)
Judy and Michael H. Steinhardt Gallery

The kouros was carved in the early sixth century B.C., and is one of the earliest free-standing marble statues from Attica, the region around Athens. Although it looks stiff and unrealistic to us, it exemplifies two important aspects of Greek Art: an interest in lifelike vitality, and a concern with design, an underlying order beneath surface appearance.

The Greeks learned to quarry stone and plan the execution of large-scale statues from the Egyptians, who had been working very hard stones for centuries. The stance of the Kouros derives from Egyptian art, and Greek artists used the formula for carving free-standing male figures for over one hundred years. From the very beginning, however, they eliminated the rectangular pillar of stone that was carved as one piece with the back of Egyptian statues. It’s extremely difficult to carve a large figure with all of the weight carried down through the two legs with no added support along the side. But in doing this, they achieved a more natural, well-balanced appearance that must have seemed extraordinarily life-like.

If you look closely at the Kouros, you can see how the artist was struggling to represent the complex anatomical details of the body. Some formulas, he’s taken from the Egyptians, such as the knee and wrist. But he has cut lines into the lower legs to show the calf muscles, even though the human form has no such incisions, and from the back, the shoulders appear as a simple, flat plane, with just a linear indication for the shoulder planes. The artist wasn’t able to convey the complex swellings of these forms. On the head, all the features are placed on the front plane, leaving flat sides with an ear placed much too far back. This is a mistake many beginning art students make. But he has made a beautiful design of the complex structure of an ear, and turned the curly long hair into lovely strings of beads.

Egyptian statues of male figures wore kilts. The kouros is nude. From the eighth century B.C. onward, the Greeks represented male figures in the nude. No other contemporary culture had this custom. Greek youths trained and competed in athletic contests in the nude. But nudity also had a connotation of heroic excellence. The beauty of a perfectly proportioned, well-trained body was considered an outward manifestation of the striving for excellence that marked a hero.

Text from: www.metmuseum.org/explore/Greek/greek5.htm