The Kritios Boy
Attributed to the circle of Kritios · About 480 BC
A naked youth stands quietly, a little smaller than life, his weight resting on his left leg while the right relaxes, his hips tilted, his head turned slightly to one side. Nothing about the pose seems remarkable until you compare him with the stiff, frontal kouroi standing nearby, with their clenched fists and identical legs. This figure is the moment Greek sculpture learned to show a body at rest and in balance, an idea later called contrapposto that European art would rely on for the next two and a half thousand years. He was carved right around 480 BC, and is named after the sculptor Kritios because of his resemblance to that artist's famous statues of the Tyrannicides.
Look at the serious, closed face. The archaic smile is gone, replaced by a calm concentration that art historians call the Severe Style. The eyes were once inlaid and are now hollow. The hair is rolled up around a fillet in a fashionable style of the day, and the anatomy of the torso, with its gentle shift of the chest and the slight curve of the spine, follows what happens to a real body when the weight moves to one leg. The genitals were deliberately knocked off in antiquity, possibly during the Persian sack.
The torso was found in 1865 and the head in 1888, in separate parts of the Acropolis fill, and they were only recognised as belonging together some years later. Whether the statue was made just before or just after the Persian destruction of 480 BC is still argued, and the answer matters because it decides whether this revolutionary pose belongs to the archaic world or the new democracy that rebuilt the sanctuary. Whatever the date, he stands here as the hinge between two ages.
Did You Know? The head and torso were found twenty-three years apart, in 1865 and 1888, and only later reunited.
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