Focus on Young Spartans Exercising and explore the Description.
The painting depicts as its subject matter two groups of adolescents, five girls (one of which is almost entirely obscured by the others) and five boys, with the girls apparently taunting or beckoning the boys. The girls are positioned on the left side of the painting and the boys on the right, while in the background stands a group of women and one man (identified as the mothers of the children and Lycurgus) watching them. The women are fully clothed, while the girls and the man are topless and the boys are entirely nude. Behind the onlookers stands the city of Sparta, dominated by Mount Taygetus, from which the bodies of the society's unfit children were supposedly thrown into a ravine to die from trauma or exposure.
Mount Taygetus Sparta left Lycurgus Taygetus