Tenea Kouros Analysis

The analysis of Tenea Kouros
Ancient Greek sculpture has been regarded as significance art history. Nowadays, many art works from Greek still have remained to continued to influenced the western civilization art and architecture model. It centralized how were Greek people thought of beauty, artistic sense and the intensive observation of the human bodies. In the period of Archaic, Greek female statues were called Kore, which is meant “girl”, and Greek male statue of this period was called Kouros, which represented the word of “young” in Greek. The purpose of Kouros could symbolize the act of dedication to the gods in the sanctuaries and as a grave monument, and even characterize the person making the offering. Tenea Kouros was found in Tenea

temple sanctuary in Corinth and in the area of the ancient settlement of Tenea, it was built up at 570 BCE, which is from the Archaic period and discovered in 1846.

The height of Tenea Kouros is 1.53 meters which is almost an actual life size sculpture with the medium of marble. As for the Tenea Kouros likes many other Kouros figure statues from the Archaic period, it’s embodied disparate of optimal of the aristocratic culture in Greece, it possessed the spirit of the technology in the Archaic period, the body proportion and muscle texture performance of Tenea Kouros is closely to realistic. The detail of anatomy had been increased the softness of the features of the face and how smooth the contours of the face are. However, it derived and evolved with the technology of Egyptian statues. First, Tenea Kouros was carved in an accurately symmetrical proportion to depict a human being on an immovable proportion. because of the upright posture, standing, made the statue became more stiff and arthritic. Tenea Kouros head is raised, eyes are straight ahead and its facing to the front, both arms are drooping, fist is clenched, also it emphasized the broad shoulders. Moreover, it’s inherited the technique of one-foot step forward, then other from Egyptian statues, Tenea Kouros statue is posed with left leg forward, both feet flat on the

ground and parallel to one another. as we looked on the side of Tenea Kouros statue, it shows a stiff posture of V- shaped groin capped by two inclined sides of thigh muscles, clench waist and swelling sides, in order to make the whole statue be able to hold it without falling, and more rigid and immovable.

And the frontage of Tenea Kouros, it exhibited the contour of armpit to from a triangle pectorals and it has a heavy contour of the parabola on its epigastric arch, and the square shaped chin had highlighted the features of symmetry form. Although all the muscles and contours were carved perfectly on the statue, it is impossible for real human to stand this irregular posture. In addition, compared to Egyptian statues, Greek male statues are always nude, because Greek believed that man’s body is sacred, and Greek believed that god like them visually. The Tenea Kouros statue was described as Apollo, which depicted as youthfulness, athletic, and with long flowing hair, most observers were content to accept that all such pieces were indeed representations of the god. It’s also impersonal representations of man and captured the flamboyant period of youth. Therefore, the Tenea Kouros statue was performed an entirely nude and resplendent in the erect glory of his beauty and bodily power. Finally, in the Archaic period, most of the statue features are puzzling, such as the “archaic smile.” It’s exactly having some kind of meaning and form containing reasons the Tenea Kouros has a slight smile, it was the significant of the facial expression on most of the statues from the Archaic period, it might have reflected a state of

ideal health and well- being. In fact, cutting and chiseling a smile on the flat stone might cause a technical difficulty, in order to fit the curved shape of mouth to somewhat block like head typical of Archaic sculpture. Therefore, the smile on Tenea Kouros is looked stiff and rigid to a real human.
Since we have studied some of the Egyptian statues in class and looked at the Tenea statue closely,
I found that Greek statues are unlike Egyptian statues given a great restraint, and because on the quality of the its nation, and the traditional shackles, the Greek Kouros statue has became an individual figure, because it’s represented the ancient political, social, economic and cultural fact to the ancient Greece.