Kouros bronze statue - Youth Man - Aristocratic Culture - Arete Beauty Nobility

A kouros is a statue of a standing nude youth that did not represent any one individual youth but the idea of youth. Used in Archaic Greece as both a dedication to the gods in sanctuaries and as a grave monument, the standard kouros stood with his arms at his sides, looking straight ahead. The kouros embodies many of the ideals of the aristocratic culture of Archaic Greece. One such ideal of this period was arete, a combination of moral and physical beauty and nobility. Arete was closely connected with kalokagathia, literally a composite term for beautiful and good or noble. Writing in the mid-500s B.C. the Greek poet Theognis summed this idea up as "What is beautiful is loved, and what is not is unloved." In a society that emphasized youth and male beauty, the artistic manifestation of this worldview was the kouros. Indeed, when the poet Simonides wrote about arete in the late 500s, he used a metaphor seemingly drawn from the kouros: "In hand and foot and mind alike foursquare / fashioned without flaw." 

All our bronze items, are cast in Greece, using the traditional 'lost wax' method. As nothing is mass-produced, there will inevitably be slight variations in patination and coloring. Each piece is, therefore, unique.