Kritios Sculptor

Place: Athens

Biography:

Kritios was an Athenian sculptor, probably a pupil of Antenor, working in the early 5th century BCE. He was the teacher of Myron. Kritios and Nesiotes made the replacement of the Tyrannicides group by Antenor, which had been carried off by the Persians in the first stage of the Greco-Persian Wars. The new group stood in the Agora of Athens and its composition is known from Roman copies. Kritios and Nesiotes made other statues, of bronze, dedicated on the Acropolis, of which only their inscribed bases remain to give testament. The head of a marble statue found on the Acropolis so much resembles the copies of one of the Tyrannicides – Harmodius – that it has been called the Kritios Boy. Its easy naturalism and relaxed contrapposto set it apart from the Late Archaic conventional kouroi that preceded it. Kritios died in 470 BC in Athens.