​ 05697

Candidate Number: X

Art and Archaeology of Greece and Rome

4AACAA01

To what extent does the so-called ‘Critian Boy’ embody a ‘Greek Revolution’ in Classical
Greek sculpture?

Tutor:
Dr Michael Squire

Deadline:
16th January, 2017

Date Submitted:
16th January, 2017

Word Count:
2036
 Only the spirit, if it breathe upon the clay, can create man.
-Antoine de Saint Exupery, ​Terre des Hommes

When the art historian Ernst Gombrich described the changes in Greek artistic

representation which occurred in Athens in the period around the early 5th century BCE, in

​ Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, he set up a

his work ​Art and Illusion: A

debate which continues to this day. That is, was there a ‘Greek revolution’ in art and, if so,

how did it come about? This revolution signalled a formal shift away from the past and from

other cultures’ arts to one which to this day defines western art history. In this essay I will

examine three points of interest pertaining to one of the sculptures of that revolution, the

Critian Boy. Firstly I will outline what came before him and how he is subtly and yet

profoundly different from his antecedents. Secondly, I will briefly examine what scholarship

has said about the date of the Critian Boy and why this matters, or indeed, why not. Finally, I

will ask whether the specific environmental conditions in Athens at the time helped to bring

about the changes which we observe in the Critian Boy. I will contend that this important

sculpture does indeed embody a revolution in Classical Greek sculpture, and that the

singular history of the whole of western art radiates outwards from his influence.

1. Form

The Critian Boy is a direct descendant of the Archaic kouros (κοῦρος) statue, whose

canonical form remained mostly fixed for the period from the second or third quarter of the

seventh century BCE through to around 480 BCE. The ancient Greek word κοῦρος

equivalates to our ​youth, and was a statue of a young man sculpted, typically from marble,

whose roles functioned as ‘cult statues, votives, or grave markers’.1 The kouroi all have

uniformly identifiable form and features - an upright, nude, muscular, forward-facing figure

1
​Neer R. (2010) ​The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago
Press.
with arms at his side; hands clenched into fists, and one leg, typically the left, taking one

decisive step forward. The body is not concerned with verisimilitude, and nor are the facial

features, whose inscrutable physiognomy contains overly large almond-shaped eyes,

death-captured lips, sometimes curled into a half-smile, and beaded hair reaching down to

the shoulders. The whole gives an impression of rigid, stylized hyper-symmetry, which

perhaps strikes the modern viewer as uncannily unnaturalistic, as in the so-called New York

Kouros (fig.1).

Fig. 1. The New York Kouros, ca. 590-580 BCE. Metropolitan

Museum of Art, New York.

This is the heritage of the Critian Boy, a heritage in which the kouros ‘runs through archaic

Greek sculpture like a chief theme in music’.2 Indeed, when considering the stylistic

deviations of the Critian Boy we may find analogy in the world of music. The contrapposto

2
​Richter G. (1942) ​Kouroi, a Study of the Development of the Greek Kouros from the Late Seventh to the Early Fifth Century
B.C., New York: Oxford University Press.
Critian Boy with his insouciant pose compared to the taut symmetry and ambivalent

expression of the kouros figure speaks of a gathering self-consciousness, a turning away

from the symbolically dominated craft of the rhapsode, to the lyric poet’s unbounded ego - it

is equivalent to the shift from early monophony to the fugues of Bach. Even late kouroi such

as the Aristodikos kouros (fig.2) project the rigid, full-frontal, forwardly-moving, direct

approach of their antecedents. The Critian Boy, in comparison, moves in all directions, his

outward force is dispersed about his form like reflected light. Standing at 1.167 metres high3,

Fig. 2. Aristodikos kouros. 510-500 BCE. National Archaeological

Museum of Athens. Athens.

the Critian Boy’s subtle sculptural refinements break with tradition:

The weight of the body, which in the kouros is distributed equally on both legs, here
rests all on the left, with the result that the hips tilt a little down from left to right, an
inclination transmitted to the lower part of the torso. But the upper part curves gently

3
​‘The height of the statue as preserved, from the top of the head to the end of the left leg, is 1.167m’. ​Jeffrey M. Hurwit (1989)
'The Kritios Boy: Discovery, Reconstruction, and Date', A ​ merican Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 93(No. 1)
 back to the left and so restores the balance, while the head is turned to the right and
slightly inclined. Incipient though it still is, this contrapposto is sufficient to break the
archaic spell and to suggest a co-ordinated organism controlled by an immanent will,
a person able to act freely in space and time.4

Fig. 3. The Kritios Boy, after 480 BCE; Acropolis Museum, Athens.

It is clear to see that the Critian Boy’s formal adjustments are elegantly simple and yet result

in a profoundly different statue from those which came before him and, as such, he both

represents and defines the revolution in Classical Greek sculpture.

2. Date

Scholarship has not yet come up with a definitive answer to the precise date of the

Critian Boy; Hurwit notes that, ‘studies of Archaic sculpture generally end with it; studies of

4
​Haynes D. E. L. (1976) 'A Late Antique Portrait Head in Porphyry', T​ he Burlington Magazine, 118(879), pp. 350-355+357.
Classical sculpture usually begin with it’5. It is not known whether he was dedicated on the

Acropolis before or after the Persian invasion of 480 BCE. Hurwit conjectures that his

creation lies in a window ‘just before the Persian destruction of the Acropolis in 480 B.C.,

technically in the last few years of the Archaic period, or just after, in the first years of the

Early Classical period.’6 Indeed, Richard Neer shows not a little uncertainty about his own

​ he Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture he

feelings on the subject. In his T

calls the Critian Boy, ‘the last example of the kouros type’7 , and later goes on to say that, ‘in

the case of the Kritian boy from the Athenian Akropolis—dating perhaps to the 470s, it is

arguably the last of the kouroi’ 8. That one such distinguished author shows the level of

uncertainty that he does makes it difficult to see how scholarship as a whole will come to

agreement on the date, and certainly not with the evidence as it stands at present. Haynes

feels quite content to pull him out of the kouros scheme thus, ‘at first glance we might take

the Kritian Boy for another kouros, but closer examination discloses small but decisive

deviations from the archaic scheme.’9 Why knowing the precise date might be important is

because if a Pre-Persian date is accepted then,

‘the virtual absence of extant pre-Persian stylistic parallels would make the Kritios
Boy an even more extraordinary work than it is ordinarily said to be, and we would
have the right to consider its sculptor...a direct participant in the revolution that
affected Greek sculpture in the first quarter of the fifth century rather than a mere
follower. The marble Kritios Boy would in that case not simply reflect a sculptural
transformation that took place entirely in another medium, but be an article of the
revolution itself.’10

5
​Jeffrey M. Hurwit (1989) 'The Kritios Boy: Discovery, Reconstruction, and Date', A ​ merican Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 93(No.
1)
6
​Ibid.
7
​Neer R. (2010) ​The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago
Press.
8
​Ibid.
9
​Haynes D. E. L. (1976) 'A Late Antique Portrait Head in Porphyry', T​ he Burlington Magazine, 118(879), pp. 350-355+357.
10
​Jeffrey M. Hurwit (1989) 'The Kritios Boy: Discovery, Reconstruction, and Date', A​ merican Journal of Archaeology, Vol.
93(No. 1)
Bracing stuff, but one might reasonably ask at what point along a timeline of related events

is the revolutionary moment to be located? Is it when the first insurgent shot is fired in a

distant village, or is it the force of movement when tanks roll onto the streets of the capital

city en masse? From an art historical point of view, to fix a definitive date for the Critian Boy

is small beer compared to the question of whether it played a part at all in the embodiment of

a so-called Greek revolution. Doubtless his creation does lie somewhere within that critical

period where that revolution was finally realised; Hurwit again: ‘thus the crucial

transformation of free-standing statuary to which it is the earliest extant witness, should be

dated to the years between 479 and, say, 475.’11 This could be read as suggesting that the

salient point is to see that the Critian Boy does indeed constitute one part of a body of ​crucial

transformation; a profound imaginative shift from the earlier kouros world to the world of

man. Though let me leave the final word to Hurwit again, this time at his phlegmatic best

when he states that, ‘nothing proves anything about the date of the Kritios Boy, and the date

one ultimately prefers will of course depend upon the evidence one chooses to emphasize.’12

3.Environment

Finally, perhaps there was something about the specific conditions of the period in

Athens at which the Critian Boy was created which brought about a new creative sensibility.

Was it that man moved from serf to free citizen in the period from the Archaic kouroi to the

Critian Boy? Perhaps the asymmetry of contrapposto is possible only when man begins to

have greater agency over his destiny. Was there a shift from the ideal representation being

one of man as draft-horse to one of a free agent in the Polis? The early kouros with his

horse-like mane, virile, yet subdued for the use is a product of the environment of his

sculptor; the sensuous, petulant, repose of the Critian Boy to his sculptor’s greater freedom.

11
​Jeffrey M. Hurwit (1989) 'The Kritios Boy: Discovery, Reconstruction, and Date', A
​ merican Journal of Archaeology, Vol.
93(No. 1)
12
​Ibid.
Sculpture is no longer simply a unit of function but now also one of articulation whose

genesis lies in the nascent agency of man as he moves from serf to citizen, from a mere

pawn in the chess game of his masters to player of the game of chess himself. Gombrich

hints at this possibility when he says that, ‘no belief in magic ever extinguished the sanity of

man; ​and the Egyptian artist surely knew that in this world he is not a maker.’13 The Greek

sculptor is the maker with a new narrative, and as Beard says, ‘many scholars would now

accept Gombrich's claim that the Greek revolution is to be explained by a change in the

whole function of art...precisely because it fulfilled a different function in the cultural, political

and the social life of the community’.14 This must mean that the community which produced

these narratives itself had changed sufficiently for the new paradigm to come into existence.

Haynes recognises that the political conditions at the time of the Critian Boy’s production

helped bring about the Greek revolution, when he says that,

The liberation of art from archaic convention is, of course, only one aspect of a
revolution which transformed the whole of Greek life and thought in the fifth century
B.C. Democracy, tragedy, philosophy and ethics, history - all the great and distinctive
achievements of the Greek genius - are in the last analysis expressions of the new
conception of human autonomy, a conception which had crystallized in the decades
around 500 B.C., above all at Athens.’15

Perhaps those political conditions freed the Greek artist to believe that he was worthy of

closer representation. Thus his mind began to observe in his work his own ego, disposition,

and physical nuances; the movement of his own body at the theatre or in the marketplace.

As the barriers between despot and citizen were slowly dismantled, then he enacts his

greater freedom in his art. Beazley captures the essence of the change well when he

lyricizes thus: ‘the archaic artist was concerned with the surface and build of the body, the

interest of the early classical sculptor recedes, inward from these, to the will.’16

13
​E. H. Gombrich (1965) Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, New York: Pantheon Books.
14
​Reflections on "Reflections on the Greek Revolution" by Beard M. Essay.
15
​Haynes D. E. L. (1976) 'A Late Antique Portrait Head in Porphyry', T​ he Burlington Magazine, 118(879), pp. 350-355+357.
16
​Greek Sculpture and Painting: To the End of the Hellenistic Period, John Davidson Beazley, B. Ashmole,
 The Critian Boy is a work of sublime beauty, one which took the Archaic kouros form

and breathed into it the will and mortality of man. The subtle and nuanced adjustments which

his sculptor brought to bear on the marble - the sinuous contrapposto, the interrogative tilt of

the head, the presence of mind - all show that it is clear that he hails a new sense or

movement in the history of art as a whole, and, therefore, one too in Classical Greek

sculpture. Yet for these adjustments to have been contemplated, first the intellectual and

imaginative architecture of the sculptor had to have been rebalanced. This adjustment came

about as a result of his greater political freedom, and as he became more aware of the

potential of his own life to be recognised as individual from others’. It matters little precisely

what date the Critian Boy was created, or where among the revolutionary concatenation of

events he stands. Rather it matters that he happened at all; he was part of a momentous

movement away from the old style to one that is perhaps still recognised today as

constituting the ​nec plus ultra of artistic representation. As such, there ought to be no doubt

that the Critian Boy is an embodiment of the unique revolution in Classical Greek sculpture.
Bibliography

Ashmole B. and Beazley J. D. (1932) Greek Sculpture and Painting, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Beard M., Reflections on "​Reflections on the Greek Revolution", Essay.

Clark K. (1973) The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art, 5th edn., London: Book Club Associates.

Gombrich E. H. (1965) Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial

Representation, New York: Pantheon Books.

Guralnick E. (1985) 'Profiles of Kouroi', Archaeological Institute of America, 89(3), pp.

399-409.

Haynes D. E. L. (1976) 'A Late Antique Portrait Head in Porphyry', ​The Burlington Magazine,
118(879), pp. 350-355+357.

Hurwit J. M. (1989) 'The Kritios Boy: Discovery, Reconstruction, and Date', ​American Journal
of Archaeology, Vol. 93(No. 1)

Neer R. (2010) ​The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture, Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press.

Raubitschek A.E. (1939) 'Leagros', H​ esperia: The Journal of the American School of
Classical Studies at Athens, 8(2), pp. 155-164.

Richter G. (1942) ​Kouroi, a Study of the Development of the Greek Kouros from the Late
Seventh to the Early Fifth Century B. C., New York: Oxford University Press.