Marble Statue of a Kouros
About 590 to 580 BC
At the entrance to the Greek galleries stands a naked young man, taller than life, with one foot forward, arms held stiffly at his sides and fists clenched. He is a kouros, a type of statue that the Greeks of the sixth century BC set up over graves and in sanctuaries, and this one is among the earliest marble figures of its kind to survive nearly complete. His face has the fixed, slightly smiling expression of early Greek sculpture, and his hair falls in a grid of beaded braids down his back.
The pose, with its left leg advanced and its weight evenly distributed, comes straight from Egypt, which the Greeks had recently rediscovered through trade. But look at how the sculptor treats the body. The muscles of the chest and abdomen, the kneecaps and the shoulder blades are drawn on the surface as pattern, in lines and ridges that are more diagram than anatomy. The knees in particular are carved as elaborate ornaments. Within a century Greek sculptors would learn to make marble seem like living flesh, and this statue shows the first step on that road.
The kouros was probably made in Attica and likely marked the grave of a young aristocrat. It was bought by the museum in 1932 and has stood at the head of the Greek and Roman galleries ever since. Its ideal of the nude male body, alert and self possessed, became the foundation of Western sculpture, and the statue works as a kind of prologue to everything from the Classical bronzes to Michelangelo.
Did You Know? The statue's ears are carved as tight spirals, a shorthand the sculptor borrowed from the way he drew hair.
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