The so–called kouros of Reggio Calabria
The statue being presented here is of Parian marble, less than life sized; its legs and arms are fragmentary. It represents a nude youth, standing in the pose either of an adept making an offering or of a winning athlete. The youth has a sophisticated and complex hairstyle, on which extensive traces of polychromy remain (pigment similar to red ochre, as ascertained by the scientific analyses, also conducted on the marble).
The statue was recovered by the Guardia di Finanza of Reggio Calabria during a raid on a private house in February 1990. Impounded on grounds of major archaeological interest, it is now in the custody of the Museo Nazionale Archeologico in Reggio Calabria, and is the subject of a court case still pending before the Tribunal of Reggio.
In view of the deep gouge in the statue’s left buttock, caused by a serrated metal point (such as that of a mechanical excavator), the presumption is that it comes from an urban building site opened in the area of the Stazione Lido before the 1980s (and subsequently closed), in which stratigraphic levels dating to the 6th–5th century BC were touched; the remains in question were evidently part of a monumental complex, perhaps of sacred character.
The stylistic characteristics and accomplished carving of the statue, among the few originals of Greek statuary so far found in southern Italy, show clear influences both of late–archaic Attic sculpture (with close affinities with the kouroi of the so–called Ptoion 20 Group, from the sanctuary of the same name in Boeotia), and of the Euboean shops active for the temple of Apollo Daphnephoros at Eretria, or of the artistic milieu from which came the eastern pediment of the temple of Apollo at Delphi. Other no less convincing comparisons with examples from Greek Sicily dating to the last quarter of the 6th century BC, and from the Chalcidian area in particular, suggest that the kouros from Reggio was probably the work of a Greek sculptor active in Rhegion, or perhaps even a local artist working in a “school” able to compete with the ateliers of the colonial bronze sculptors mentioned by the literary sources.
