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In 1961, Danish Egyptologist Erik Iverson described a canon of proportions in classical Egyptian painting. [2] This work was based on still-detectable grid lines on tomb paintings: he determined that the grid was 18 cells high, with the base-line at the soles of the feet and the top of the grid aligned with hair line, [3] and the navel at the eleventh line. [4]
Body proportions is the study of artistic anatomy, which attempts to explore the relation of the elements of the human body to each other and to the whole. These ratios are used in depictions of the human figure and may become part of an artistic canon of body proportion within a culture.
It is a typical Greek sculpture depicting the beauty of the male body. "Polykleitos sought to capture the ideal proportions of the human figure in his statues and developed a set of aesthetic principles governing these proportions that was known as the Canon or 'Rule'. [7] He created the system based on mathematical ratios.
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]
Polykleitos used distinct proportions when creating this work; for example, the ratio of head to body size is one to seven. The figure's head turned slightly to the right, the heavily-muscled but athletic figure of the Doryphoros is depicted standing in the instant that he steps forward from a static pose.
Around 455 B.C., Myron, a sculptor of the transition, created his Discobolus, a work that already shows a more advanced degree of naturalism, and soon after, around 450 B.C., Polykleitos consolidated a new canon of proportions, a synthesis that convincingly expressed the beauty, harmony and vitality of the body and gave it an aspect of eternity ...
Some scholars argue that Pythagorean thought influenced the Canon of Polykleitos. [5] The Canon applies the basic mathematical concepts of Greek geometry, such as the ratio, proportion, and symmetria (Greek for "harmonious proportions") and turns it into a system capable of describing the human form through a series of continuous geometric ...
Hierarchical proportion is a technique used in art, mostly in sculpture and painting, in which the artist uses unnatural proportion or scale to depict the relative importance of the figures in the artwork. For example, in Egyptian times, people of higher status would sometimes be drawn or sculpted larger than those of lower status.