Kouros - Origin and Evolution

Origin and Evolution

The problem of the evolution of the kouros type is inevitably linked to that of the development of monumental Archaic Greek sculpture tout court. There are fundamentally two schools of thought on how those Daedalic forms, some of which we know of only from the literature (kolossos, bretas, andrias and xoanon), became the free-standing sculpture in the round of the 6th century; namely, that it was a response to the internal development of Greek types and religious needs or a product of foreign influence. For an external cause for change possible sources of influence have been cited as Egypt, Anatolia and Syria, with the strongest case made for Egypt. It is known that the Greeks had longstanding trade relations with Egypt prior to the founding of the Greek entrepôt of Naukratis in the mid-7th century from where the Greeks could have learned Egyptian sculpting methods. Although, we see that the feature sculptures of Egyptian are so different from the feature sculpture of Ancient Greeks.

The work of Guralnick along with the previous studies by Erik Iversen and Kim Levin have added considerably to the argument for an imitation by Greek sculptors of Egyptian sculpture. The system of proportion in the second Egyptian canon of the Saite period consisted of a grid of twenty-one and one fourth parts, with twenty-one squares from the soles of the feet to a line drawn through the centres of the eyes. The grid was applied to the surface of the block being carved, allowing the major anatomical features to be located at fixed grid points. Iversen has shown that the New York kouros conforms to this ratio of proportion. It was Guralnick, however, who developed this discovery by comparing other kouroi by means of cluster and Z-score profile analysis to the Egyptian Canon II and a control group composed of statistically average Mediterranean men. As a result she has identified two strains within methods of proportioning in sixth century kouroi, where the majority follow the general line of evolution from the foreign model towards an idealized human norm.