Scribeworks

This statue is over 2300 years old. It's one of the very few ancient sculptures left with its original eyes, and I can’t get over how real they look... The statue is the Antikythera Ephebe, a Greek bronze of a young man made around 340 to 330 BC, and strangely enough, the reason it survived is because it sank. In antiquity, bronze statues were constantly melted down for their metal, turned into weapons and coins, which is why almost none survive. This one went to the bottom of the sea in a shipwreck around 60 BC and lay there for nearly two thousand years, until sponge divers found it in 1900. But let’s go back to my favorite detail: the eyes. When a bronze statue is made, the eyes are often set separately, inlaid with glass, stone, and colored paste to make them lifelike, and over the centuries almost every ancient bronze has lost them, leaving those hollow, blank sockets we think of as classical. The Ephebe still has his original eyes, made of glass paste, one of only a handful of ancient Greek bronzes in the world that do. And it changes everything because he does not gaze blankly into nothing, he seems to be looking, intently, at something that vanished more than two thousand years ago...