The Lysippan Kairos: 3D Reconstruction
You are seeing a turntable animation of the reconstructed statue of the famed Kairos, a divine figure that personifies the "right time", by the 4th C BCE sculptor Lysippos. For more than a century, since the discovery of the Turin relief, the Lysippan Kairos was known to us only as a two-dimensional profile figure.
With 3D digital technology, we finally can, for the first time, experience the Lysippan Kairos in its full, volumetric glory. Note, however, that it's not just a nifty tool that makes this beautiful divine youth "look good"—there are some very important discoveries to be made in understanding what this statue really stood for and how it was meant to be viewed... let alone the obvious explanation for the absence of full-scale Roman marble copies! Some skeptics even suggest that the Lysippan Kairos might never have existed because of this.
Well, one look at the 3D model will suffice: it's a problem of structural balance of an inverted pyramid... Hollow bronze is one thing, but a copy in marble? Not even Daedalus would have been able to make a marble version of the Lysippan Kairos stand on a single tiptoe without him falling over!
Video: Courtesy of Dave Cortes
© SeungJung Kim and Dave Cortes