Head of a Youth "Rayet Head"

myminifactory

The nose is missing, and there are slight injuries to ears, hair and face. Otherwise splendidly preserved with distinct traces of red paint on the eyes, mouth and hair, which contrast with the polished white surface of the face. Bought by Carl Jacobsen in 1879 as his first acquisition of antique art at a Paris auction of the collection of the French archaeologist Olivier Rayet. The Rayet Head, as it is still called after its former owner, belonged to a kouros of more than life-size dimensions. According to the earliest record of its finding it was unearthed in western Athens, near the gas works, which suggests that it was part of a sepulchral statue in the cemetery outside of the Dipylon Gate. It was carved by an Attic artist in the third quarter of the 6th century B. C. and is one of the earliest examples of the short hair which supplanted the long curls of the earlier period. The Rayet Head is one of the finest archaic works of art extant, outstanding by virtue of the magnificent tectonic structure of the features and by the lifelike expression and the delicate treatment of the surface. It unites the best traditions of the great monumental art of early archaic time (cp. No. 11 a) with the more naturalistic attitude of a younger generation. Its high quality places it in a class of its own within contemporary Attic sculpture, and in spite of several attempts, no other work by the same artist has ever been demonstrated convincingly. A work very close to it is the early Kore from the Acropolis, whose head and upper body has long been in the Lyons Museum (Payne & Young: Archaic Marble Sculpture pi. 22 seqq.). Its relationship to a Dionysus mask from Icaria, in the Athens National Museum, has also been pointed out (Athen. Mitt. 53, 1928, pi. 1, Beil.21-22), and also to somewhat later works such as the peplos-clad Acropolis Kore or the head of Athena from the pediment group of the Peisistratids’ Athena temple in the Acropolis (Payne & Young: Archaic Marble Sculpture pi.29 seqq.).