no laughing greeks

We have all heard at school about the archaic smile and we have seen it in museums on Kouroi and Korai. Yet, we very rarely see laughter depicted in ancient Greek sculpture, while in other cultures we come across laughing representations of gods (for instance, the laughing Buddha). This is an observation made by Yannis Tsividis, Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University in New York, who addressed it as a question to distinguished archaeologists, art historians, classical philologists, curators, and historians of ideas. Their answers, which were immediately and very kindly given, are published here. (Unfortunately we did not have an equally forthcoming response from Greek scholars).

more from Eurozine here.