Greek sculpture is remembered for its white marble, yet the people who carved it painted the stone. They gave their metal figures glass eyes and wounds of inlaid copper, and some statues were buried on purpose soon after they were made. What survives came back from pits, shipwrecks and a castle moat, often in pieces and stripped of its color.
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What Greek Sculptors Were Trying to Do
Greek sculptors worked on one great subject, the human body. Gods, athletes and the dead were all shown as people, and for four centuries the problem stayed the same: how to make marble or cast metal look like someone alive.
The answers changed over time, and historians divide them into three periods. Archaic statues of young men, called kouroi, and of young women, called korai, stand straight and smile. Classical figures shift their weight and move. Hellenistic ones sleep, fight and twist.
Most of that work is lost. Metal statues were melted down and reused, and many marbles survive only as Roman copies. The choice here favors originals, from all three periods, with a single statue known only through copies, and each one has a story that can be told through to its end.
12. Aristion of Paros, Phrasikleia Kore (about 550 to 540 BC)
A closed flower is pressed against the chest of this young woman. Her dress reaches her feet, and a crown of buds sits on her braided hair. A few patches of red still cling to the marble of her skirt. Her name is Phrasikleia, and scholars knew it for more than two centuries before anyone saw her face.
The name came first, on a stone base reused in the walls of a country church in Attica, the region around Athens, and recorded in 1729. Its inscription speaks in the voice of the dead girl: "Kore I shall forever be called, this name given to me by the gods instead of marriage."
A kore is an unmarried girl. Phrasikleia had died before her wedding, and her statue stood over her grave. The same base carries the signature of the man who carved her, Aristion of Paros.
The statue itself turned up only in the summer of 1972. Archaeologists found it lying in a pit beside the figure of a young man, a kouros. The two had been buried with care, soon after they were carved, and nobody knows why.
Two explanations have been proposed. Around 546 BC, the tyrant Pisistratus took back power in Athens, and the family may have hidden its monuments from him and his supporters. Or the burial came later, before the Persian army sacked Athens in 480 BC.
Whatever the reason, the pit protected more than the stone. It kept traces of paint, and their analysis found red and yellow iron oxides, cinnabar on the dress, gold leaf, and a leaf of lead and tin that once shone like silver. The flower she holds is a lotus bud, a plant linked to Hera, the goddess of marriage, and it may be one more reference to the wedding she never had.
Those traces were enough for two German archaeologists, Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann, to make a painted copy. Begun in 2010 and finished in 2019, it was shown in New York in 2022, and their Phrasikleia wears a red dress covered with rosettes and stars. The original, in Athens, has kept only a few patches of red.
At a Glance
Artist: Aristion of Paros (6th century BC, dates unknown)
Carved: About 550 to 540 BC
Medium: Parian marble with traces of paint
Size: Height: 176 cm (69 in)
Where to see it: National Archaeological Museum, Athens
About This Sculpture
Where was the Phrasikleia Kore found?
In Merenda, a village in eastern Attica that stands on the site of the ancient town of Myrrhinous.
Who was Aristion of Paros?
A sculptor from Paros, a Cycladic island known for its fine white marble, active in the middle of the 6th century BC. He is known through his signature on this base.
11. The Antikythera Youth (about 340 to 330 BC)
His right arm is raised, and his fingers curl around something that is no longer there. This naked young man in bronze lay for centuries on the seabed off a small Greek island. In 1900, the first man to see the wreck that held him came back up shaking, and said he had seen a heap of dead people.