Kouros of Paros
Unknown (Paros) · c. 540-530 BC
A naked young man stands with his arms at his sides, one leg slightly forward, in the pose that Greek sculptors repeated for a century and a half. His long hair is arranged in careful curls over the forehead and bound by two ribbons, and his lips lift in the faint archaic smile. The lower legs and the right arm are lost, and the left arm has been reassembled from two fragments. Even incomplete, the torso shows the shift under way in the mid sixth century BC: the muscles of the chest and belly are no longer engraved lines but gently swelling volumes.
The statue was found in 1902 in the sanctuary of Asclepius on Paros, the Cycladic island whose white marble was prized throughout the Greek world, and it was carved there around 540 to 530 BC. Statues of this type, called kouroi, were set up in sanctuaries as offerings and over graves as monuments; they represent not gods but idealised young men, athletes or the dead. The Louvre bought the figure in 1910. It stands here among the works that lead from the stiff Daedalic figures of the seventh century towards the naturalism of the classical age.
Did You Know? The kouros comes from the island whose marble quarries supplied sculptors across the ancient Greek world.
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