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Kouros (κοῦρος, kûːros, plural kouroi) is the modern term given to free-standing Ancient Greek sculptures that depict nude male youths. They first appear in the Archaic period in Greece and are prominent in Attica and Boeotia, with a less frequent presence in many other Ancient Greek territories such as Sicily. Such statues are found across the Greek-speaking world; the preponderance of these were found in sanctuaries of Apollo with more than one hundred from the sanctuary of Apollo Ptoion, Boeotia, alone. These free-standing sculptures were typically marble, but the form is also rendered in limestone, wood, bronze, ivory and terracotta. They are typically life-sized, though early colossal examples are up to 3 meters tall. The female sculptural counterpart of the kouros is the kore. The Ancient Greek word kouros (κοῦρος) refers to "youth, boy, especially of noble rank." When a pubescent was received into the body of grown men, as a grown Kouros, he could enter the initiation fest of the brotherhood (phratry, φρατρία). Apellaios was the month of these rites, and Apollo (Apellon) was the "megistos kouros" (the greatest Kouros). The word is also attested in Linear B, a syllabary system of writing used to record the Mycenaean Greek dialect of the Hellenic languages. The word ko-wo (*κόρϝος, *kórwos) is attested in tablets from Pylos and Knossos, and could mean "the sons of the women recorded in those tablets". The term kouros was first proposed for what were previously thought to be depictions of Apollo by V.I. Leonardos in 1895 in relation to the youth from Keratea, and adopted by Henri Lechat as a generic term for the standing male figure in 1904. The kouros type appears to have served several functions. It was previously thought that it was used only to represent the god Apollo, as attested by its depiction on a vase painting in the presence of supplicants. This association with Apollo was supported by the description of the statue of the Pythian Apollo at Samos by Diodoros as "Egyptian in style, with his arms hanging by his sides and his legs parted".

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Related concepts (8)

Ancient Greek sculpture

The sculpture of ancient Greece is the main surviving type of fine ancient Greek art as, with the exception of painted ancient Greek pottery, almost no ancient Greek painting survives. Modern scholarship identifies three major stages in monumental sculpture in bronze and stone: the Archaic (from about 650 to 480 BC), Classical (480–323) and Hellenistic. At all periods there were great numbers of Greek terracotta figurines and small sculptures in metal and other materials.

Contrapposto

Contrapposto (kontrapˈposto) is an Italian term that means "counterpoise". 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 in the axial plane. First appearing in Ancient Greece in the early 5th century BCE, contrapposto is considered a crucial development in the history of Ancient Greek art (and, by extension, Western art), as it marks the first time in Western art that the human body is used to express a psychological disposition.

Kouros