Greek Statues: The Famous Sculptures of Ancient Greece

Greek statues are the sculptures made in ancient Greece and the Greek world between about 650 and 30 BC, in marble, bronze, and gold and ivory, and they set the model for the human figure in Western art. The most famous include the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace in the Louvre, the Laocoön group in the Vatican, the Parthenon sculptures, the Discobolus and the Riace bronzes.

Two facts surprise most visitors. Many "Greek statues" in museums are Roman marble copies of lost Greek bronzes. And almost all of them were originally painted, in skin tones, red lips and patterned clothing. This guide follows Greek sculpture from its stiff beginnings to the drama of the Hellenistic age, then shows how later sculptors kept the Greek myths in marble.

Archaic: the kouros and kore (c. 650–480 BC)

The first large Greek stone statues were the kouroi, standing nude young men, and korai, clothed young women. Influenced by Egyptian sculpture, a kouros stands frontally with fists clenched and the left foot forward, smiling the faint "Archaic smile". They served as grave markers and offerings to the gods. The New York Kouros in the Metropolitan Museum and the Peplos Kore in the Acropolis Museum in Athens are classic examples, the latter still showing traces of its painted dress.

Early Classical: the body comes alive (c. 480–450 BC)

Around 480 BC, sculptors broke the frontal pose. The Kritios Boy in the Acropolis Museum shifts his weight onto one leg, so his hips and shoulders tilt, the pose later called contrapposto.

Bronze, cast in pieces by the lost-wax method, let sculptors stretch limbs into open space. The Charioteer of Delphi (c. 470 BC), the Artemision Bronze of Zeus or Poseidon hurling a missing weapon (c. 460 BC, National Archaeological Museum, Athens) and the two Riace Bronzes, warriors pulled from the sea off Calabria in 1972, are rare bronze survivors. Most ancient bronzes were melted down for their metal.

The Riace warriors show what was lost. They are over two meters tall, with copper lips and nipples, silver teeth in one of them, and eyes of inlaid stone and glass, details that no marble copy preserves.

High Classical: Phidias, Polykleitos and the Parthenon (c. 450–400 BC)

This is the age of the ideal. Myron's Discobolus (Discus Thrower) caught an athlete at the instant before release; it survives only in Roman marble copies, the best in Rome and the British Museum. Polykleitos wrote a treatise, the Canon, on perfect proportion and illustrated it with the Doryphoros (Spear Bearer).

Phidias directed the sculpture of the Parthenon in Athens, built between 447 and 432 BC. The Parthenon frieze, about 160 meters of carved marble that ran around the inner building, is traditionally read as the Panathenaic procession in honor of Athena. Roughly half of it is in the British Museum, removed by agents of Lord Elgin in the early 1800s, and most of the rest is in the Acropolis Museum; Greece has long asked for the reunification of the marbles. Phidias's greatest works, the gold and ivory Athena Parthenos and the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, are lost and known only from descriptions, coins and small copies.

Late Classical: Praxiteles and Lysippos (c. 400–323 BC)

In the fourth century, the gods relaxed. Praxiteles made the Aphrodite of Knidos, the first monumental female nude in Greek art, so famous that the city of Knidos reputedly refused to sell it to pay off its debts. The Hermes and the Infant Dionysus at Olympia, often attributed to him, shows the soft modeling and S-curve that defined the period. Lysippos, court sculptor to Alexander the Great, made figures slimmer, with smaller heads, and designed them to be seen from every side.

Hellenistic: drama and emotion (323–31 BC)

After Alexander's conquests, Greek sculpture spread from Egypt to Afghanistan and became more theatrical, with new subjects: old age, children, drunkenness, defeated enemies and private emotion.

The Winged Victory of Samothrace (c. 200–190 BC) lands on the prow of a warship, her wet drapery whipped against her body by the wind; she now stands at the top of the Daru staircase in the Louvre. The Venus de Milo (c. 150–125 BC), found by a farmer on the island of Milos in 1820, is attributed from a lost inscription to Alexandros of Antioch. The Dying Gaul, a Roman copy of a Pergamene bronze, gives a defeated enemy real dignity.

The Laocoön and His Sons, in the Vatican, shows the Trojan priest and his sons crushed by sea serpents. Pliny the Elder credited it to three sculptors from Rhodes. Scholars still disagree on whether the marble found in Rome in 1506 is a Hellenistic original or a Roman copy.

Were Greek statues white?

No. Greek sculptors and painters worked together. Marble statues were painted with mineral pigments, skin in warm tones, eyes and lips colored, garments patterned in red, blue and gold, and bronzes had copper lips and inlaid stone or glass eyes. The paint wore away over centuries of burial and weather, and Renaissance and Neoclassical artists, seeing only white stone, built an ideal of pure white marble that the Greeks never held. Ultraviolet light and microscopic analysis have since recovered traces of the original color on many works, and reconstructions such as those in the traveling exhibition Gods in Color show how bright they once were.

Why are noses and arms missing?

Projecting parts break first when a statue falls or is buried: noses, arms, fingers and genitals. Some damage was also deliberate. Early Christians and later iconoclasts sometimes defaced pagan images, especially faces, to "disable" them. The missing arms of the Venus de Milo have never been found, and reconstructions of what she held, an apple, a mirror, a shield, remain guesses.

How to look at a Greek statue

Start with the feet and the weight. Whether a figure stands squarely on both legs or shifts onto one tells you, more reliably than anything else, roughly when it was made. Then look at the eyes: empty eye sockets usually mean inlays of stone or glass have fallen out. Finally, check the label for the words "Roman copy after", which tell you that you are looking at a later version of a lost Greek original.

The afterlife of Greek statues

From the Renaissance onward, sculptors returned to Greek myths and Greek ideals of the body. Bernini's Apollo and Daphne and The Rape of Proserpina, Canova's Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss and The Three Graces and many nineteenth-century marbles in this collection, such as Jean-Baptiste Giraud's Dying Achilles and Laurent Marqueste's Perseus and the Gorgon, are not Greek but are unthinkable without Greek models. They appear in the list after the ancient works. For the stories behind them, see Greek Mythology in Art and our wider list of famous sculptures.