Polyclitus

Greek sculptor

• Born: c. 460 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Argos or Sicyon, Greece
• Died: c. 410 b.c.e.
• Place of death: Greece

Polyclitus was a highly accomplished sculptor, famous for his idealized depictions of the male body and for his masterpiece, a sculpture of a spear bearer, which defined the classical ideal in European art for centuries.

Early Life

Not much is known about the early life of Polyclitus (paw-lee-KLI-tuhs). Ancient sources reveal next to nothing about his family background. According to the Roman historian Pliny the Elder, Polyclitus was born at Argos, an ancient city in Southeast Greece on the gulf of Argolis in the eastern Peloponnese. Polyclitus’s artistic career probably began by the late 450’s b.c.e.

As a young man, Polyclitus became a student of another highly accomplished Greek sculptor, Hageladas, who also taught Phidias, the architect and sculptor of the Parthenon in Athens. From Hageladas, Polyclitus learned the intricate skills of design and how to work in marble, bronze, stone, chryselephantine (works overlaid with gold and ivory), and other media. He also studied under Pythagoras of Rhegion, another sculptor who worked in bronze. Although no work of Pythagoras of Rhegion can be identified today, historians remember him for his artistic innovations; Pythagoras is thought to have been the first sculptor to represent veins and muscle sinews in his statues, a noticeable feature of Polyclitus’s masterpiece, the Doryphorus, or spear bearer. Pythagoras also had a deep interest in sculptural theory and was the first Greek sculptor to aim for mathematical precision, rhythm, and symmetry. A skilled craftsman like Polyclitus probably earned a good income as the Greek Mediterranean trade economy developed; some sculptors became wealthy from the demand for their art for use in commemorations and religious shrines.

Life’s Work

Polyclitus became famous for working almost exclusively in bronze. All of his famous sculptures of heroes, gods and goddesses, athletes, politicians, and statesmen were made of metal except for the magnificent Hera of Argos (c. 423 b.c.e.), which was chryselephantine. Polyclitus excelled so highly at the art of depicting the human form that his works were considered unsurpassed by anyone in ancient Greece.

Probably around 440 b.c.e., Polyclitus set up a workshop at the shrine of Zeus and Hera at Olympia, where he produced bronze representations of victorious young athletes seen in competition. When Polyclitus first became known in the ancient world, he was making heavy and idealized statues of young, muscular gods and heroes. Just before he traveled to Ephesus to work on a new sculpture of an Amazon warrior for a temple competition, he changed his sculptural style by lengthening the limbs of his stocky figures. He started to make their appearance softer, more lifelike, and evenly proportioned. Polyclitus’s statue the Diadumenos, or fillet binder, shows these new artistic inclinations as it depicts an athletically robust form that expresses grace, lightness, and ease. It shows the symbolic gesture of tying up the victor’s hair with a ribbon after successful competition in wrestling or track and field.

At the bustling seaport of Ephesus on the southeast Ionian coast c. 435 b.c.e., Polyclitus created a statue of an Amazon warrior that was included in the Ionic Temple of Artemis (goddess of the hunt), regarded as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. This female sculpture accentuates the idea of grace combined with athleticism and power. The warrior raises her right arm upward as she gently touches the back of her head in repose, and her robe bunches up between her exposed breasts.

Legend says that five accomplished sculptors in a competition at Ephesus were asked to vote for their first and second choices for the best Amazon statue. Each of the five chose his own creation as the best, and three chose Polyclitus’s Amazon for second place, so he was judged to have won. After this work, the sculpture of Polyclitus becomes lighter, less muscular, and more youthful, focusing almost entirely on adolescent male athletes. Polyclitus’s experience at Ephesus must have sharpened his artistic eye for detail and softened the edge of his chisel. From the more slender and graceful sculpture of the years after 435 b.c.e. emerged much of the humanistic element in Greek art of the fourth century b.c.e. Greek sculpture before Polyclitus had been stylized and less realistic, but after Doryphorus, Greek sculptors such as Praxiteles carried forth the Polyclitean ideal of youthful, appropriately muscular athletes. This approach to the human figure has been the central idea of European art ever since.

Besides his work in the sculpture studio, Polyclitus also wrote a book called the Canon (fifth century b.c.e.) that elucidates the guiding ideals behind his art; most of the discussion of dimensions and proportions is based on his sculpture Doryphorus. Polyclitus’s Canon was the most famous ancient theoretical work on art and possibly the first professional treatise on sculpture in the world. Although no complete copy survives, enough information in fragmentary quotes and allusions exists in the work of other writers to create a reasonable understanding of its content and scope. In the Canon, Polyclitus writes that perfection is attained little by little, through many numbers. He describes a mathematical hierarchy of human proportions in which every part of the body, from the fingers and toes through the head, neck, torso, and legs, is related to every other part using numbers. The body as a whole thus contains many mathematical relationships. Galen, a physician and medical writer states:

Beauty does not reside in the overall ratios of the body, but in the commensurability of their individual parts, as for instance of finger to finger and of all the fingers to the metacarpus and carpus, and of these to the forearm, and of the forearm to the entire limb, precisely as is written in the “Canon” of Polykleitos, who supported his theory by producing a statue consonant with its prescriptions.

The purpose of Polyclitus’s Canon was not only to explain the technique of an artist but also to describe “the beautiful” and “the good” in the sculpture, which was a mastery of symmetry and commensurability of each individual part to the whole. The Canon attempts to find an underlying pattern in a visual phenomenon, demonstrating a fascination with numbers associated with the belief that in mathematics lies the founding principles of beauty and even abstract ideas like love and justice. Ancient Greeks such as Pythagoras of Rhegion and Polyclitus explored musical harmony and remarked how the intonation needed for harmony on a stringed instrument could be translated into numbers such as 2:1, 3:4, and so forth. This caused Polyclitus to look for these patterns in nature in visual events such as the movement of the stars and planets. He thought that underlying harmonic patterns could be found throughout nature.

Significance

Polyclitus was a sculptor. He was also a theoretical and practicing artist whose views were studied five hundred years later by Roman artists and historians. Polyclitus’s reputation today rests largely on a single sculpture, the Doryphorus, which appears in almost every museum book on ancient Greek sculpture and on history of art of the ancient world. The Doryphorus is the pivotal statue in the development of Greek sculpture and in the evolution of Polyclitus’s career. Polyclitus made Argive sculpture synonymous with dignified, minutely detailed, muscular portrayal of the strong and graceful male athlete in monumental bronze or marble. The Doryphorus is only preserved through Roman copies of the Greek original, and the severe, exaggerated lines of the Roman copy do not convey the subtle beauty of the original. No ancient writer describes it in detail, but fragments identify it as a nude, virile boy holding a spear, ready for athletics or warfare.

Polyclitus’s masterpiece can be understood from the perspective of the harmony of opposing forces and the balance of opposites. The Doryphorus rests on his right leg, with his left leg slightly bent and relaxed. His right arm hangs at his side, while his left is curved upward, with fingers bent around a spear handle. This structural design brings together disparate elements by setting up cross-relationships between rigid and relaxed limbs. Known as the Greek letter chi, or X, the design became the standard for both Greek and Roman sculptors. The chiastic principle throws light on the composition of Doryphorus. Two lines crossing form the Greek letter chi, but the line descending right to left is straight, while the other is curved like an inversed S. If the letter X is imposed on Doryphorus, the two sides of the sculpture are opposed, with the left side as the straight side and the right side as curved. These oppositions are then balanced with the contrasts between active and passive parts of the body. The right leg is engaged and active, while the left leg is passive, relaxed, and somewhat withdrawn. The same is true of the arms, although turned around. The same is true of the balancing of the torso, because the chest is turned toward the left, while the Doryphorus’s head turns toward the right. The left shoulder is lowered and balanced by the lowered right hip.

When the Doryphorus is compared with earlier Greek sculpture such as the Kritios Boy, the contrapposto (off-balance position with one of the opposing legs extended slightly forward) has now become more natural and emotive. The Doryphorus shows much more distinct differentiation between the right and left halves of the body, with every crease of skin and layer of muscle uniquely pronounced. The Doryphorus’s slight turn of the head and precise anatomical detail, combined with the harmonious proportions of the figure, made it renowned as the standard embodiment of the classical ideal of the human body. The Doryphorus became so famous to antiquity that it was simply known as the Canon.

The Roman historian Pliny the Elder wrote of Polyclitus’s accomplishments in his Naturalis historia (77 c.e.; The Historie of the World, 1601; better known as Natural History):

Polykleitos . . . made an athlete binding the diadem about his head, which was famous for the sum of one hundred talents which it realized. This . . . had been described as “a man, yet a boy”; the spear-bearer as “a boy, yet a man.” He also made the statue which sculptors call the “canon,” referring to it as a standard from which they can learn the first rules of their art. He is the only man who is held to have embodied the principles of his art in a single work.

Bibliography

Boardman, John. Greek Art. Rev. ed. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996. Regarded as a standard work in the field of classical art, this book provides an overview of the masterpieces of ancient Greece as well as commentary on recent discoveries and controversies of interpretation surrounding the world’s best-known works of art and architecture.

Carpenter, Rhys. Greek Sculpture: A Critical Review. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960. An exploration of the evolution of sculptural style in ancient Greece, with special attention paid to the technical procedures, craftsmanship, and changing styles of the artist’s craft as he seeks to emulate the human form.

Moon, Warren G. Polykleitos, the “Doryphoros,” and Tradition. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. Scholarly essays by eighteen experts in classical sculpture and art history, from a symposium devoted to assessing the career of fifth century Greece’s most renowned sculptor, Polyclitus of Argos.

Vermeule, Cornelius. Greek Sculpture and Roman Taste. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977. Lectures on the installation of sculpture in Greek and Roman times, creative commercialism for architectural display, and literary and archaeological evidence for understanding how the Greeks and Romans displayed sculpture.

Vermeule, Cornelius. Polykleitos. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1969. A brief but highly informative introduction to the career of Polyclitus with an assessment of his accomplishment and the influence he had on Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman sculptors.