Kritios Boy
Encyclopedia
Ancient Greek sculpture
Ancient Greek sculpture is the sculpture of Ancient Greece. Modern scholarship identifies three major stages. They were used to depict the battles, mythology, and rulers of the land known as Ancient Greece.-Geometric:...
; "the first beautiful nude in art", as Kenneth Clark
Kenneth Clark
Kenneth McKenzie Clark, Baron Clark, OM, CH, KCB, FBA was a British author, museum director, broadcaster, and one of the best-known art historians of his generation...
thought, it is a precursor to the later classical sculptures of athletes. The Kritian boy is thus named because it is attributed on slender evidence to Kritios
Kritios
Kritios was an Athenian sculptor, probably a pupil of Antenor, working in the early 5th century BCE, whose manner is on the cusp of the Late Archaic and the Severe style of Early Classicism in Attica. He was the teacher of Myron...
who worked together with Nesiotes (sculptors of Harmodius and Aristogeiton
Harmodius and Aristogeiton (sculpture)
A sculptural pairing of the tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogeiton was well known in the ancient world in two major versions but survives only in Roman marble copies...
) or their school, from around 480 BC. The statue is considerably smaller than life-size at 1.17 m (3 ft 10 ins).
It is on display in the New Acropolis Museum
New Acropolis Museum
The Acropolis Museum is an archaeological museum focused on the findings of the archaeological site of the Acropolis of Athens. The museum was built to house every artifact found on the rock and on its feet, from the Greek Bronze Age to Roman and Byzantine Greece...
of the Acropolis of Athens
Acropolis of Athens
The Acropolis of Athens or Citadel of Athens is the best known acropolis in the world. Although there are many other acropoleis in Greece, the significance of the Acropolis of Athens is such that it is commonly known as The Acropolis without qualification...
, near the site where it was excavated. The torso was found in 1865 by Sam Rumpf while excavating the foundation of the old museum at the Athenian Acropolis. The head of this statue was found twenty-three years later by Rumpf and older brother, Alex Rumpf, between the museum and the Acropolis south wall, in the latest stage of the rubble of destruction undergone in the Persian Wars. This fact, in conjunction with the analysis of its style, is essential to the dating of the statue.
Whether or not Kritios was the innovator, with the Kritios Boy (ephebos
Ephebos
Ephebos , also anglicised as ephebe or archaically ephebus , is a Greek word for an adolescent age group or a social status reserved for that age in Antiquity....
) the Greek artist has mastered a complete understanding of how the different parts of the body act as a system. The statue supports the body's weight on the left leg, while the right one is bent at the knee in a relaxing state. This stance, known as contrapposto
Contrapposto
Contrapposto is an Italian term that means counterpose. It is used in the visual arts to describe a human figure standing with most of its weight on one foot so that its shoulders and arms twist off-axis from the hips and legs. This gives the figure a more dynamic, or alternatively relaxed...
, forces a chain of anatomical events: as the pelvis is pushed diagonally upwards on the left side, the right buttock relaxes, the spine acquires an "S" curve, and the shoulder line dips on the left to counteract the action of the pelvis. Among classic Greek sculptures, the Kritios Boy expresses the "Canon of Polyclitus" and his pupils.
It set the rule for later sculptors like Praxiteles
Praxiteles
Praxiteles of Athens, the son of Cephisodotus the Elder, was the most renowned of the Attic sculptors of the 4th century BC. He was the first to sculpt the nude female form in a life-size statue...
and Lysippos
Lysippos
Lysippos was a Greek sculptor of the 4th century BC. Together with Scopas and Praxiteles, he is considered one of the three greatest sculptors of the Classical Greek era, bringing transition into the Hellenistic period. Problems confront the study of Lysippos because of the difficulty of...
, whose contrapposto, or ponderation, is more emphasised than the "subtle equilibrium of line and axis which is to be the basis of classical art" exhibited by the Kritios Boy's "delicate balance of movement" (Clark).
The Kritios Boy exhibits a number of other critical innovations that distinguish it from the Archaic Kouroi
Kouros
A kouros is the modern term given to those representations of male youths which first appear in the Archaic period in Greece. The term kouros, meaning youth, was first proposed for what were previously thought to be depictions of Apollo by V. I...
from the seventh and sixth century BC that paved its way. The muscular and skeletal structure are depicted with unforced life-like accuracy, with the rib cage naturally expanded as if in the act of breathing, with a relaxed attitude and hips which are distinctly narrower. As a final forebear of the classical period, the "smile" of Archaic statues has been completely replaced by the accurate rendering of the lips and the austere expression that characterized the transitional Severe style
Severe style
The severe style, or Early Classic style, was the dominant idiom of Greek sculpture in the period ca. 490 to 450 BCE. It marks the breakdown of the canonical forms of archaic art and the transition to the greatly expanded vocabulary and expression of the classical moment of the late 5th century...
. It was created in same era as the Blond Kouros's Head of the Acropolis
Blond Kouros's Head of the Acropolis
The so called Blond Kouros's Head of the Acropolis is the head of a lost marble statue of a young man of ca 480 BC, in the Acropolis Museum in Athens, Greece The head and part of the pelvis were found in 1923 northeast of the museum site on the Acropolis of Athens. It belongs to the late archaic...
and the group of the "Tyrannicide
Tyrannicide
Tyrannicide literally means the killing of a tyrant, or one who has committed the act. Typically, the term is taken to mean the killing or assassination of tyrants for the common good. The term "tyrannicide" does not apply to tyrants killed in battle or killed by an enemy in an armed conflict...
s" Harmodius and Aristogeiton
Harmodius and Aristogeiton
Harmodius and Aristogeiton were two men from ancient Athens...
. A good example for comparison is the marble statue of an ephebos in the museum in Agrigento
Agrigento
Agrigento , is a city on the southern coast of Sicily, Italy, and capital of the province of Agrigento. It is renowned as the site of the ancient Greek city of Akragas , one of the leading cities of Magna Graecia during the golden...
.
