Scala/Art Resource, NY

Unlike their predecessors (and many of their descendants), Greek artists championed the youthful, athletic male form, as seen in this astonishingly life-like bronze warrior, one of two statues called the Riace Warriors. Cast by an unknown sculptor perhaps in the mid-fifth century B.C., the statues were found 30 years ago on the sea floor off the coast of Riace, in southern Italy; the 1,000-pound bronzes may have been heaved overboard during a storm to help save the ship. After conservators removed encrusted sand, gravel, sea salts and barnacles—in a painstaking process that took more than seven years—they discovered that the statues were virtually intact, lacking only the weapons they once bore.