ATHENS — The President of the Hellenic Republic Katerina Sakellaropoulou on Monday inaugurated the new exhibition at the Museum of Cycladic Art, "Kallos: The Ultimate Beauty", emphasising that it awakens awareness in the visitor of the rejuvenating power of beauty, which is connected not only to physical appearance, but also with spiritual virtue.

Referring to the more than three hundred emblematic antiquities from Greece and abroad, presented in the exhibition, she stressed that they are examples of this multifaceted and multidimensional concept that sealed the daily life of our ancestors as a necessary condition, inspired the epic and lyric poets and was crystallised in the texts of the philosophers of the fifth and fourth centuries BC, who connected it not only with outward physical appearance, but also with inner qualities.

At the same time, she pointed out that the exhibition, presenting the manifestations of beauty in ancient art, archaic and classical beauty, divine, human, athletic, heroic, even demonic, refers us to the model of good, the combination of physical strength and beauty with integrity. "It introduces us to the way in which beauty was invested in different eras of antiquity, emphasising its symbols (the archaic), the ethos it exudes (the classical), or the passion (the Hellenistic). And it offers us the panoramic view of an ideal that found its perfect representation in art and was treated with awe and respect by the ancients in their daily lives. Maybe because they believed that any insult to beauty, internal or external, causes its loss."