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9-636: The free-standing sculpture strides forward with the " archaic smile " playing slightly on his face. The sculpture is dated to the Late Archaic Period c. 540–515 BC and stands 1.95 metres high. It is now situated in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens (inv. no. 3851) in Athens, Greece. The sculptor of the kouros is uncertain and there is no secure record of the time and location of its discovery. It

18-702: Is also found on Etruscan artworks during the same time period nearby on the west side of the Italian peninsula, as consequence of the influence of Greek art on Etruscan art. An example of this commonly featured in art history texts is the Sarcophagus of the Spouses , a terracotta work found in the necropolis of Cerveteri . It features a smiling couple reclined seemingly at a banquet. The slight geometric stylization, level of realism and physical scale are also strikingly similar to Greek works from this period featuring

27-512: Is simply the result of a technical difficulty in fitting the curved shape of the mouth to the somewhat-blocklike head typical of Archaic sculpture. Richard Neer theorizes that the archaic smile may actually be a marker of status, since aristocrats of multiple cities throughout Greece were referred to as the Geleontes or "smiling ones". There are alternative views to the archaic smile being "flat and quite unnatural looking". John Fowles describes

36-399: The archaic smile in his novel The Magus as "full of the purest metaphysical good humour [...] timelessly intelligent and timelessly amused. [...] Because a star explodes and a thousand worlds like ours die, we know this world is. That is the smile: that what might not be, is [...] When I die, I shall have this by my bedside. It is the last human face I want to see." The Greek archaic smile

45-574: The art that proliferated contained images of people who had the archaic smile , as evidenced by statues found in excavations all across the Greek mainland, Asia Minor, and on islands in the Aegean Sea . The significance of the convention is not known although it is often assumed that for the Greeks, that kind of smile reflected a state of ideal health and well-being. It has also been suggested that it

54-508: The front line of battles; and second, the authenticity of the Getty kouros , which bears a falsified provenance and displays a suspicious similarity to the Kroisos kouros. This Ancient Greece  related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This sculpture article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Archaic smile The archaic smile

63-447: The marker of Kroisos, dead, whom, when he was in the front ranks, raging Ares destroyed". The Kroisos Kouros is central to two ongoing archeological debates: first, whether kouroi represent specific young men or are generic representations of idealised archetypes, which may not actually resemble a specific individual commemorated, and thus represent a symbolic embodyiment of the ideal male warriors promachoi (πρόμᾰχοι) who fought in

72-683: Was identified in Paris in 1937 in the possession of the art dealer M. Roussos. An investigation was launched and reports showed that some years before it had been illegally unearthed from a burial mound in Anavissos in Attica . It was sawn in various parts and sent to Paris for sale before it was returned to the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. The inscription on the base of the statue reads: "Stop and show pity beside

81-651: Was used by sculptors in Archaic Greece , especially in the second quarter of the 6th century BCE, possibly to suggest that their subject was alive and infused with a sense of well-being. One of the most famous examples of the archaic smile is the Kroisos Kouros , and the Peplos Kore is another. By the middle of the Archaic Period of ancient Greece (roughly 800 BCE to 480 BCE),

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