Archaic smile

By the middle of the Archaic Period of ancient Greece (roughly 800 BCE to 480 BCE), the art that proliferated contained images of people who had the archaic smile,[1][2] as evidenced by statues found in excavations all across the Greek mainland, Asia Minor, and on islands in the Aegean Sea.

[1] The significance of the convention is not known although it is often assumed that for the Greeks, that kind of smile reflected a state of ideal health and well-being.

[3] It has also been suggested that it is simply the result of a technical difficulty in fitting the curved shape of the mouth to the somewhat-blocklike head typical of Archaic sculpture.

An example of this commonly featured in art history texts is the Sarcophagus of the Spouses, a terracotta work found in the necropolis of Cerveteri.

The slight geometric stylization, level of realism and physical scale are also strikingly similar to Greek works from this period featuring the archaic smile.