The Blond Boy
About 480 BC
A marble head of a young man, a little smaller than life, looks down and slightly to one side with an expression of deep, private thought. His hair is combed forward from the crown, plaited at the back and wound around his head in a braid, and when he was found in 1887 it still carried so much yellow paint that he was immediately nicknamed the Blond Boy. Traces of that colour survive if you look closely. Only the head and a fragment of the lower body are preserved, and they are shown together, but the head is enough to make him one of the most memorable faces in the museum.
He was carved around 480 BC, at the very end of the archaic period, and belongs with the Kritios Boy nearby to the moment when Greek sculptors abandoned the fixed smile and frontal stare of the previous century. The heavy, closed lips, the fleshy chin and the lowered eyes give him a melancholy that seems almost modern. Look at the volume of the skull under the hair, the softness of the cheeks and the way the eyelids are modelled as real folds of skin rather than carved lines. The eyes were painted rather than inlaid, which suits the quiet mood.
He was found in the fill on the Acropolis, north-west of the Erechtheion, among the sculpture buried after the Persian sack, so he can only have stood in the sanctuary for a very short time before the destruction. Whom he represents is unknown, perhaps a victorious athlete dedicated by his family. Compare him with the Kritios Boy standing near him: the same date, the same seriousness, perhaps even the same workshop. Together they mark the beginning of the Classical style in a single quiet room.
Did You Know? He was named the Blond Boy by the excavators of 1887 because his hair was still bright yellow when he came out of the ground.
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