The New York Kouros is an early example of life-sized statuary in Greece. The marble statue of a Greek youth, ''

kouros kouros ( grc, κοῦρος, , plural kouroi) is the modern term given to free-standing Ancient Greek sculptures that depict nude male youths. They first appear in the Archaic period in Greece and are prominent in Attica and Boeotia, with a less ...

'', was carved in

Attica Attica ( el, Αττική, Ancient Greek ''Attikḗ'' or , or ), or the Attic Peninsula, is a historical region that encompasses the city of Athens, the capital of Greece and its countryside. It is a peninsula projecting into the Aegean Se ...

, has an Egyptian pose, and is otherwise separated from the block of stone. It is named for its current location, at the

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

. The Metropolitan Museum of Art said in "Marble statue of a kouros (youth)" that "The statue marked the grave of a young Athenian aristocrat."

Style

The statue is similar to the (near-contemporary) statue of Mentuemhet and represents an example of daedalic statuary style. The statue is stylized and not representational. It is highly geometric, and the body is idealized and abstracted, especially in the muscles and the areas of the joints. The eyes and face are not realistic to how a person would look; this statue is not attempting to be observational in nature. The motif of a male figure with his arms straight to his sides, standing upright, and facing forward is unmistakable. The kouros is stiff, rigid, and linear; there is little movement depicted and the figure's specifics aren't touched on in the overall body outline of the subject. However, the left foot is displayed as forward of the right foot, potentially signaling to the viewer that the kouros is walking.

Context

This kouros was carved in Attica during the archaic period of

Ancient Greece Ancient Greece ( el, Ἑλλάς, Hellás) was a northeastern Mediterranean civilization, existing from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th–9th centuries BC to the end of classical antiquity ( AD 600), that comprised a loose collection of cult ...

. It was a time that Greece was splintered into many

city-states A city-state is an independent sovereign city which serves as the center of political, economic, and cultural life over its contiguous territory. They have existed in many parts of the world since the dawn of history, including cities such as ...

. Greek artists were making more and more naturalistic representations of the human figure throughout the 6th century BC. During this time, Greece was coming out of an orientalizing period, where Ancient Greece was increasingly influenced by various eastern and southern civilizations. This explains why the statue takes on a more natural look than previous Greek art yet still retains those orientalizing features—particularly the Egyptian influence, with whom they had considerable contact. Kouroi were often used as grave markers or dedications for the gods. Many kouroi, in the style of this one, were typically heavily Egyptian influenced, with the left leg forward and arms to the side. Historical evidence suggests that Greeks had some familiarity with Egyptian technical procedures by this point and that Greek visitors to

Egypt Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and southwest corner of Asia via a land bridge formed by the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediter ...

—charmed by the colossal Egyptian statuary they saw—persuaded Greek sculptors to adopt and augment the style to remove, in the words of Hurwit, Plantzos, and Campbell in ''Kouros,'' “the stone screens connecting legs and arms”, “the vertical slab against which Egyptian statues were usually set”, and to strip the subject matter down to the nude. They also used the Egyptian grid system.

Pose

The Department of Greek and Roman Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art stated in ''Greek Art in the Archaic Period'' that through the proportions of the statue, as well as its pose, this particular kouros shows its influence from Egypt. In fact, like many other kouroi, the pose and stance itself was directly borrowed from Egyptian art, likely explaining its similarity to statues such as the statue of Mentuemhet and the

iconography Iconography, as a branch of art history, studies the identification, description and interpretation of the content of images: the subjects depicted, the particular compositions and details used to do so, and other elements that are distinct fro ...

behind the similar stance and posture. This kouros served as the grave marker for a young Athenian Aristocrat and was produced by a person of the Attic culture. This is shown because in Athenian culture funerary monuments were especially popular for marking the graves of people who died young (but not necessarily depicting them). In these respects, this kouros is very typical for the Greek kouroi of the time. The dimensions are: 76 5/8 × 20 5/16 × 24 7/8 in. (194.6 × 51.6 × 63.2 cm) Other (height w/o plinth): 76 5/8 in. (194.6 cm) Other (Height of Head): 12 in. (30.5 cm) Other (Length of face): 8 7/8 in. (22.6 cm) Other (shoulder width): 20 5/16 in. (51.6 cm) c. 590–580 BCE.

Notes

References

External links

*{{Portal bar, Visual arts, New York City, History 7th-century BC Greek sculptures Kouroi Sculptures of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Nude sculptures in New York (state)