Kouros Greek Boy Sculpture

(Greek Boy Sculpture) Here art relinquishes hard stone for supple boy-flesh, as one might offer himself to a higher acause or purpose. The beauty of this Greek boy caught so casually in his adolescent pose and smile, has about it a paradox: How is perfection born from imperfection? Is the maker less than his masterpiece, or equal to it? Nature’s fundamental law is rigid, fixed: kind begets only its kind. No imperfect flesh has ever engendered anything less – except in art. The mind that conceived this boy, the inner eyes that envisioned him, the hands that shaped him from dead to living stone – how was this perfection sustained to its completion? Is art the only exception? Perfection is completeness of a thing, a finality of action, a standing uniquely alone, the culmination of divergent parts yet whole, like no other in its integrity. Only in art do we humans know it. This marble boy has attained it, has outlived his maker, yet has lost nothing of the freshness of his awakening from stone and his first taste of light with a never-fading smile. *Kouros: In ancient Greek the word “kouros” meant a male youth, and at least from the fifth century BCE a beardless youth