GETTY VILLA MUSEUM

Getty Villa museum

Getty Villa museum

Introduction

Various forms of online media afford interactivity and participation, whether it is via written text, audio, still and moving images, or some combination of these. Such forms can exist outside the constraints of traditional printed, peer-reviewed scientific publication in an academic journal. These days, most of the people prefer using internet rather than going to museum. At Getty Villa, there are number of interesting pieces of arts which can become a source of attraction for the museum if they are projected properly. Two of them are Kouros and Venus de' Medici (Hurwit, 1985).

Kouros

Term applied to one of the principal forms of Archaic Greek (c. 700-c. 500/480 BC) free-standing sculpture: a nude, beardless, often enigmatically smiling male. Such figures, which may be of bronze or stone, stand upright with one foot (usually the left) advanced, and their weight distributed evenly on both legs, a pose similar to that of their female counterpart, the Kore. Both hands are generally held close to the sides, although in stone kouroi flexed or freer arms are secured to the thighs by means of struts. Usually sculpted in marble, less often in limestone, stone kouroi seem rigidly four-square, reflecting the blocks from which they were originally carved. However, many are actually asymmetrical; their heads, torsos or legs are often turned slightly to one side, and the figures are often set obliquely on their bases, tempering their block-like appearance.

Importance

The most controversial kouros is a superb example bought by the Getty in 1983. Its provenance was attested by a letter apparently written in 1952 by the German scholar Ernst Langlotz, who noted that the statue was in a private Swiss collection. The letter bears a postal code that was not created until the 1970s, and so must be a forgery. The ...