The reunited kouros of Lentini goes on display at the Archaeological Museum of Syracuse

They are going on display in Syracuse, for the last stop of their Sicilian “tour,” the torso of the kouros of Lentini and the so-called Biscari Head, fragments of a single statue finally reunited: The rediscovered kouros (this is the title of the exhibition) will be at the Regional Archaeological Museum “Paolo Orsi” in Syracuse from September 8, 2020 to March 8, 2021, after stopping in Palermo and Catania.

The kouros was a Greek statue depicting a young man, and widespread between the 7th and 5th centuries B.C. (it had votive or funerary functions). The kouros of Lentini, dating from between 530 and 490 B.C., was divided into two parts: the “Apollonian” head found in the 18th century by the prince of Biscari, Ignazio Paternò Castello (hence the name by which it is known), now preserved in the Museum of Castello Ursino in Catania, and the headless torso that was acquired in 1904 by Paolo Orsi, preserved instead in the Regional Archaeological Museum in Syracuse. The reunification had begun to be talked about after Vittorio Sgarbi launched the idea, and the operation was strongly supported by the late Sicily Region’s culture councillor Sebastiano Tusa, who promoted its restoration by the Siqilliya firm. Tusa also oversaw the project for the enhancement of the kouros, with the aim of restoring integrity to the work and resolving the querelle that had arisen around the hypotheses about the actual pertinence of the two fragments to a single statue. An affair that has had an important contribution with the petrographic and geochemical investigations promoted by the LapiS (Lapidei Siciliani) Association, thanks to which it was concluded that both finds were obtained from the same block of marble, taken from the Greek island of Paros.

When the review is over, an international conference on the Lentini kouros will be held to take stock of what we know about the statue, and at the end of the “tour” the reunited work will find its final location in the Syracuse museum.

The reunited kouros of Lentini goes on display at the Archaeological Museum of Syracuse

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