Pictures, images & photos of Ancient Greek Sculpture, statues antiquities from the Archaic Greek to the Hellenic Greek periods. What is known as Ancient Greece is today the Cyclades Islands, Greek mainland and the Aegean coast and its islands. It was common to use a small figure as a votive offering or in a grave burial. These go back as far as 2800 B.C on the Cyclades island and were simple figures in terracotta or stone. The first Greek period that shows the craftsmanship and skill of Greek sculptures was around and before 500 BC, which is known as the Archaic period and was inspired by Egyptian art. One of the dominant styles of the Archaic Greek sculpture is the Kouros, a nude standing youth and the Kore, a draped standing girl. The nude male was prized in Greek sculpture as the male body was seen as a thing of great beauty. The Greek Olympic athletes competed in the nude. Because the Gods had human forms statues of the Gods in the nude are also normal in Greek Sculpture. After the Archaic came the Greek Classical period, from about the 5th cent B.C to the 4th cent B.C. By this time the Greek sculptures skills had been perfected and they were able to produce realistic and idealised style that evolved following the conquests by Alexander the Great (336 B.C to 323 B.C) into the Hellenic Period. The Hellenistic period saw what some saw as a drop in standards as the sculptures became less idealistic and more realistic depicting real emotions. Once the Romans had conquered Greece from 146 B.C there was a demand for copies of classic Greek sculptures that were produced almost like factory items. This period of Roman copies of Greek classical sculptures is important to archaeology as it preserved some lost Greek classical sculptures as Roman copies.

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