A Kouros by Any Other Name

Seth Estrin (Chicago)
A Kouros by Any Other Name
Thursday March 9
4:10 pm
912 Sproul Hall

Today, perhaps no category of Greek sculpture is more iconic than the kouros. Yet in antiquity, the kouros did not exist – not, at least, in name. As evidenced by the inscriptions that accompanied them, statues we call kouroi were named by their ancient beholders in very different terms, ones that open up forms of visualization familiar from Homeric epics. Attending closely to the relationship between text and image in one particular monument, that erected over the burial of a man named Kroisos, I explore in this talk alternative ways of addressing Archaic sculpture and new ways of seeing it.