( fl early 5th century BC). Greek sculptors. They worked in Athens, and though Pliny (Natural History XXXIV.xix.49) dated them to 448–444 BC (i.e. the 83rd Olympiad), epigraphic and stylistic evidence suggests a date closer to c. 480–470 BC. Lucian (Rhetorum praeceptor 9) described their work as ‘compact and sinewy and hard and precisely divided into parts by lines’ (see J. J. Pollitt: The Ancient View of Greek Art, New Haven, 1974, p. 120). Their most famous sculpture was the Tyrannicides, a bronze group that depicted Harmodios and Aristogeiton attempting to assassinate Peisistratos’ sons, Hipparchos and Hippias, in 514 BC. It was commissioned by the Athenian state after an earlier version by Antenor had been carried off by the Persians in 480/479 BC and was completed in 477/476 BC (see Inscr. Gr./1, XII.5.444), being set up in the Agora at Athens. Only a small fragment of its base survives, but most scholars believe that it is reproduced by several full-sized Roman copies (e.g. Naples, Mus. Archeol. N.; see also GREECE, ANCIENT, fig. 56) and that some ancient plaster casts from Baiae (Báia, Parco Archeol.) were taken from it. The so-called Kritios Boy (Athens, Acropolis Mus.; see GREECE ANCIENT, fig. 55) has sometimes been attributed to Kritios, because its head resembles that of Harmodios. It is one of the first nude male statues to abandon the stiff pose typical of Archaic kouroi for a relaxed stance with the weight clearly carried by the left leg, and it thus stands at the beginning of the Early Classical period.

• Kritios
  • collaboration
    • Athens, §II, 2(ii): Agora: Sculpture
  • works
    • Athens, §II, 1(ii)(b): Acropolis: Non-architectural sculpture
    • Greece, ancient, §IV, 1(v)(a): Monumental sculpture: Craftsmen and society
    • Greece, ancient, §IV, 2(iii)(a): Early Classical monumental sculpture
    • Greece, ancient, §IV, 2(iii)(a): Early Classical monumental sculpture