Hair In The Archaic Period

In the Archaic period, the Greeks developed a monumental stone sculpture for the representation of life-size, nude, young men (kouroi) and life-size, clothed, young women (korai). The kouroi, which were evidently made to serve a funerary purpose at a gravesite, emulate the frontal pose of standard Egyptian statues, but, over the course of the sixth century, are carved with increasingly more realistic anatomy. Faces, however, retain the conventional "Archaic smile" which serves to illustrate that the person is alive. Korai, shown wearing contemporary fashionable clothing, evidently stood as votive offerings in temple sanctuaries. A stylistic "sister" to the Anavysos kouros is the statue of a kore wearing a peplos, a simple, long, woolen belted garment that
gives the female figure a columnar appearance.
A characteristic of this statue is representational of the style of hair that was popular in the culture of the time. Long braided locks are arranged on the sculptures of women held by a brim worn atop the forehead. Another distinct characteristic displaying the popular posture present in the scultpure of women in the Archaic period was the positioning of the arms. One arm is positioned across the abdomen while the other across the waistline along their backside. This elegant and graceful pose is acredited to the bow of an actor/actress after their performance in a play still to present day. The change in artistic style from the Archaic to the Classical seems to have coincided with the Greek repulse of the Persians after their sack of the Athenian Acropolis in 480 BCE. The Early Classical style (ca. 480-450 BCE)
is marked by radical changes in the approach to the human figure. During the High Classical period (ca. 450-400 BCE) artists and architects established canons of proportions for both the human figure and for temples. The Classical style profoundly influenced the subsequent development of Western art and culture. Early Classical sculptures were the first to bee concerned with portraying how a human being actually stands. Humans shift their weight and the position of the main body parts around the vertical, but flexible, axis of the spine. When humans move, the body's elastic musculoskeletal structure dictates a harmonious, smooth motion of all its elements. Since the quest for ideal form was the dominant focus of sculptural attention at the time, less sculpture of women was a result since clothing was mandated when representing the female figure. Depicting the muscular structure of men cast a shadow on the development of the differently curvacious figure of the female body, permanently vielded by clothing. The advent of dewey eyes in the late classical period, however, brought the attention back to female scultpure. The concept of dewey eyes is conveyed passionately in the Aphrodite of Knidos, not openly erotic (the goddess modestly shields her pelvis with her right hand), but quite sensuous. This posture, and leisurely stance was the pinnacle of the involvement of sexual innuendo at the time. Hellenistic sculpture exhibits a "baroque" exaggeration of form and emotional intensity. Physical movement and gesture are given an almost theatrical pathos and drama. Moreover, statues are made to interact with their environment, sometimes as part of a tableau, which heightens the illusion of their presence and actions. Both female and male figures display a heightened erotic sexuality as the body is explored both in action and repose. Hellenistic sculptors also expanded the range of subject types by drawing from the lower social classes and including more realistic portraits and images of children and old people. Archaic statues smile at their viewers, and even when classical statues look away from the viewer, they are always awake and alert. Hellenistic sculptors often portrayed sleep.