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5.4: Kritios Boy

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    Kritios Boy

    5.png

    Artist: Unknown
    Medium: Marble
    Art Historical Time Period: Early Classical Greek (ca. 480 BCE)

    The Kritios Boy is a statue of a young man that was made in ancient Greece after the Persian Wars. It shows a shift in Greek art towards making statues look more natural. Instead of standing stiffly like earlier statues, the Kritios Boy stands with one leg holding his weight and the other relaxed. This pose is called contrapposto and makes the statue look like it could move at any moment.

    This statue was important because it was one of the first to show the human body in a realistic way. Artists learned a lot from making it, and later statues like the Spearbearer were even more lifelike. The Kritios Boy helped shape how artists think about balance and movement in art, inspiring sculptures all the way through the Renaissance and even today

    Vocabulary

    • Contrapposto A pose where one leg supports the weight, making the body look more natural and relaxed.

    Student Authors

    • Yuni Castro ’25 and Natalie Rebollo ‘25

    References and Image Attribution

    • Boardman, John. Greek Sculpture: The Classical Period. Thames & Hudson, 1985.

    • Osborne, Robin. Archaic and Classical Greek Art. Oxford University Press, 1998.

    • Pedley, John Griffiths. Greek Art and Archaeology. Pearson, 2011.

    • Image: “009MA Kritios” via Wikimedia Commons by Marie-Lan Nguyen. Licensed under CC BY 2.5. Modified from original.

     

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    5.4: Kritios Boy is shared under a not declared license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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