Polykleitos' Diadoumenos

Athletes in ancient Greece were heroes, just like today. Many Greek sculptures honor victors of sacred games like the Olympics, in which Greece's finest athletes competed to honor the gods. This statue depicts an anonymous athlete tying on a woolen fillet -- that means a wreath or diadem, not a fish! Its hands have been lost (parts that stick out tend to break off of ancient statues).

As soon as an athlete in Greek games was declared victor, he would tie on a ribbon. Later, he would receive an honorary olive wreath, laurel wreath, or celery (!) wreath, depending on the festival. (Link: The Olympic Games in Antiquity).

Some athletes received statues as awards, or simply as a fan homage. But I suspect this statue was not a portrait of a particular athlete, but rather, Polykleitos' salute to the beauty of the human form.

(NOTE: Some have interpreted this statue as the god Apollo, but that's due to the Delian copy having a quiver down by his right foot. Other versions don't have it. Delos was supposed to be the birthplace of Apollo, so the copyist may have put a new slant on an old classic.)

Ancient artists were amazingly skilled at eyeballing and imitating existing sculptures precisely -- after all, they had to be able to carve identical temple columns, architectural decorations like rosettes, and rows of identical statues very accurately. Sometimes they made plaster casts of the originals, but they still had to carve marble versions.

The Romans, masters of mechanics, also developed a "pointing process" using instruments like calipers for tracing statues in three dimensions onto a hunk of marble. This allowed them to rough out the proportions accurately, then go in by hand to add fine details like curls, eyes, lips, much the way modern computer graphics use motion capture to map stunt doubles' bodies, then animators add in the facial features.

Greek Sculpture Before Polykleitos

In the mid fifth century B.C., Polykleitos wrote an influential handbook, the Canon, outlining his method for representing the human body. He was working in the tradition of symmetria, proportions, which the Greeks had adapted from ancient Egyptian art. We still see this concept today in art books which teach you to draw figures and faces using the head or eye as a unit of measurement.

Greek workshops had settled on formulas like, "the human body is eight heads high." Polykleitos, however, wanted to do more than just represent the human figure accurately. He believed that the human body, like music, had hidden rhythms and proportions that were an expression of to eu, "the perfect." (This was when the Greeks were discovering geometry and the mathematics of music, which suggested that the real world was shaped by simple, elegant mathematical ratios). Polykleitos wished to bring out these hidden harmonies as clearly as possible.

Photo Credit: Jerry7171, CC

In addition to his own set of "perfect" proportions, Polykleitos came up with the famous contrapposto posture: one leg bent and relaxed, one leg straight and weight-bearing, causing the hips to tilt. The shoulders tilt in the opposite direction. In some sculptures, the arms also "harmonize" with the legs, with the straight arm relaxed, the bent arm tense. The balance between stiff and relaxed, bent and straight creates a visual rhythm like a dance, making motionless statues seem animated. This pose is also called chiastic, after the Greek letter Χ, chi.

At left is Polykleitos' most famous statue, the Doryphoros or "spear carrier," which demonstrates contrapposto. I've colored the tilted hips and shoulders orange, the tensed, weight-bearing limbs purple, and the relaxed limbs yellow. (The bent left arm is broken, missing its forearm-- it once held a spear).

The pose was so visually appealing that numerous Greek sculptors adapted and played with the basic idea: weight shifted onto one leg, opposite knee bent, hips and shoulders tilted at opposite angles. To this day, many sculptors still use some version of contrapposto.