The Early Classical Period.

About 480 B.C.E., just before the Persians under King Xerxes sacked Athens, someone dedicated a kouros (a Greek male nude statue) on the Acropolis which has been labelled the "Critian Boy" because of the resemblance of its head to a statue group by two sculptors, Critias and Nesiotes, erected a few years after the Persian invasion had been defeated. The Critian Boy faces the onlooker like earlier kouroi, but he stands relaxed, his weight on one leg, his head inclined. His body is skillfully modeled. It is that of an athletic youth aged eighteen or nineteen. There is no vestige left of the "archaic smile," typical of earlier statues, indicating its stylistic alignment with sculpture from the classical period. The sculptors who produced the kouroi and korai (female versions of the kouroi, only clothed) are...