The Kroisos Kouros (Ancient Greek: κοῦρος) is a marble kouros from Anavyssos (Ανάβυσσος) in Attica which functioned as a grave marker for a fallen young warrior named Kroisos (Κροῖσος).
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👉 Kroisos Kouros in the context of Kouros
Kouros (Ancient Greek: κοῦρος, pronounced [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.
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Kroisos Kouros in the context of Anavyssos
Anavyssos (Greek: Ανάβυσσος) is a town and a former municipality in East Attica, Greece located in the Athens Riviera. Since the 2011 local government reform it is part of the municipality Saronikos, of which it is a municipal unit. The municipal unit has an area of 14.478 km. At the 2021 census it had 6,180 inhabitants.
It is situated near the Saronic Gulf coast, at the foot of Olympos hill (487 m). It is 2 km north of Palaia Fokaia, 4 km east of Saronida, 10 km west of Lavrio and 34 km southeast of Athens city centre. The Greek National Road 91 (Athens - Sounion) passes south of the town, along the coast. Anavyssos is located in the area of ancient Attica's demos of Anaflystos (Ανάφλυστος), which has shown significant archaeological findings like Kroisos Kouros that is exhibited in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. The contemporary settlement was originally a village founded by Greek refugees who resettled there after fleeing from various areas of Asia Minor after the Asia Minor Campaign.
Kroisos Kouros in the context of Archaic smile
The archaic smile 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), 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 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 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."