To smile: To express amusement, pleasure, moderate joy, or love and kindness, by the features of the face; to laugh silently.
A mysterious smile: the archaic smile! The significance of this mysterious, thin lipped smile is not known. It is a smile which suggested a feeling of happiness, perhaps echoing the prosperity and relative peace of the time. Artists felt it represented that they were blessed by the gods in their actions.
The ancient Greek approach to life, where everything had a human measure and the passions of the gods did not differ from those of the mortals gave art a new dimension. For the first time in ancient Greek art the world of the gods is not different from that of the mortals, gods and mortals are presented in exactly the same way. Gods are approachable, almost friendly. The Greek ideal of beauty involved Gods looking like humans and humans looking like Gods!
The archaic smile could not have existed without this kind of ideological background.
The archaic smile, the main characteristic of the archaic art expresses the joy and exultation of man before the miracle of life.
The ancient Greek artist invented his own self and became the creator of god and man alike in a universe of perfect formal proportions, idealized aesthetic values and a newly found sense of freedom. This was a freedom from barbarism and tyranny and a transition towards self-determination. The sculptures of Greece, more than any other art form, are the pure expression of freedom, self-consciousness, and self-determination.
The journey of sculpture in ancient Greece begins with the kouroi (the majestic naked young men who represent eternal youth, beauty and power) and the korai (the clothed young maidens, obedient and immobile, representing feminine grace and humility). On their faces a mysterious smile bestowing a sense of abundant vivacity, both expressing the trust to the human power.
Archaic art is a silent witness to the extraordinary development western society was about to undertake. The Kouros and Kori statues stand before a cultural revolution, all muscles tense, like a spring about to burst with energy into an extraordinary wave of classical thought. They stand with meaningful smiles, as if they knew what was about to occur: the classical era and the Golden Age of Greek thought.
How far away are we from this approach?
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