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Greek art emphasized humanism along with the human mind and the human body's beauty. [8] Greek youths trained and competed in athletic contests in the nude. A great contribution to the contrapposto pose was the concept of a canon of proportions, in which mathematical properties are used to create proportions. [9]
Contrapposto, a pose that visualizes the shifting balance of the body as weight is placed on one leg, was a source of his fame. The refined detail of Polykleitos's models for casting executed in clay is revealed in a famous remark repeated in Plutarch's Moralia, that "the work is hardest when the clay is under the fingernail". [9]
Another example of the influence the Doryphoros had on sculpture much later than its initial conception can be seen in Michelangelo's David, now located in the Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence. The contrapposto style, idealised youthful male nudity, and overall antiquitical inspiration all show echoes of Polykleitos' Doryphoros.
The statue is an idealized image of Augustus showing a standard pose of a Roman orator [4] and based on the 5th-century BC statue of the Spear Bearer or Doryphoros by the sculptor Polykleitos. The Doryphoros's contrapposto stance, creating diagonals between tense and relaxed limbs, a feature typical of classical sculpture, is adapted here.
The contrapposto pose was also used by Michelangelo in his David (1501-1504). It is reported that Michelangelo painted this fresco in a single giornata, that is, a single working day of approximately eight hours. [2] During Michelangelo's lifetime, this fresco was considered evidence of the painter's technical prowess at its peak.
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The contrapposto stance, subtly shifting the athlete's weight from one leg to the other, imparts a semblance of motion and adds an element of realism to the artwork. The potential energy expressed in this sculpture's tightly wound pose, expressing the moment of stasis just before the release, is an example of the advancement of Classical ...
Polykleitos: The Doryphoros, the summary of the aesthetic idealism of Classicism. The sculpture of Classicism, the period immediately preceding the Hellenistic period, was built on a powerful ethical framework that had its bases in the archaic tradition of Greek society, where the ruling aristocracy had formulated for itself the ideal of arete, a set of virtues that should be cultivated for ...