A statue is a free-standing sculpture that features realistic, full-length figures of people or animals carved or cast in a durable material such as wood, metal, or stone. But did you know why statues in Ancient Greece were built with small penises?
Small penises are depicted on Ancient Greek male statues because they represented the ideals of male beauty at the time: youth, strength, and modesty. Large penises were thought to be vulgar and associated with savages and evil spirits.
What Materials Did Sculptors Use to Build a Statue During Ancient Greece?
By the classical period, roughly the fifth and fourth centuries, the monumental sculpture was almost entirely composed of marble or bronze, with cast bronze becoming the preferred medium for major works by the early fifth century; many pieces of sculpture known only in marble copies made for the Roman market were originally made in bronze.
Smaller works were created in a wide range of materials, many of which were precious, with a large production of terracotta figurines. Except for Sicily and southern Italy, the territories of ancient Greece had an abundance of fine marble, with Pentelic and Parian marble being the most valuable. Bronze ores were also relatively easy to obtain.
Both marble and bronze are easy to shape and very durable; as in most ancient cultures, there were no doubt traditions of sculpture in a wood about which we know very little, other than acrolithic sculptures, which are usually large, with the head and exposed flesh parts in marble but the clothed parts in wood. Because bronze has always had a high scrap value, very few original bronzes have survived, though marine archaeology or trawling has added a few spectacular finds in recent years, such as the Artemision Bronze and Riace bronzes, which have significantly extended modern understanding. (Source: World History)
Ancient Greek Considering Nudity as a Costume
The Greek nude is, in fact, a complicated and mysterious concept that, despite years of study, they find difficult to grasp. It has something to do with nakedness in public, obviously, and Greek homosexuality, obviously, and a love of athletics and the gymnasium, obviously, and war, probably, but it is also about morality, virtue, and metaphysics. One thing is certain: Greek nudity is not simply the result of a complete lack of self-consciousness, as Nature intended.
In Athens, meanwhile, each graduating year of ephebes would streak from the altar of Love in the gymnasium known as the Academy to the Acropolis carrying torches, the laggards and the podgier ones getting slaps from the crowds as they huffed and puffed through the main city gate on Athena’s birthday at the hottest time of year.
Nudity was a kind of costume, a notion bolstered by the fact that much time appears to have been spent oiling and scraping oneself up. The best body condiment was olive oil made from the sacred olive trees given to Athens by Athena and awarded as prizes in the games that accompanied her birthday. The salty boy gloop, or paidikos gloios, that resulted was sometimes collected and used to treat ailments and signs of aging. (Source: The Guardian)