A rule for the body
The Greek word kanon means a measuring rod, a rule. Polykleitos of Argos, one of the most famous sculptors of the fifth century BCE, gave the word its artistic meaning: he formulated a system of proportions that gave his figures a sense of life and of permanence, clarity and harmony, and that allowed others to reproduce the effect. He set it out in a treatise called the Canon, now lost, and in his statues, which survive only in later copies.
Why would anyone measure beauty? For a sculptor the answer is practical. A system lets you build a convincing body every time, and lets your pupils do the same, much as a tailor’s pattern lets anyone cut a coat that fits.
What did the Canon say?
Only fragments of its ideas survive, through other writers. The fullest comes from the Greek physician Galen, writing in the second century CE, who reports the view of the philosopher Chrysippus: beauty lies in the commensurability of the parts, that is, of finger to finger, of all the fingers to the palm and the wrist, of these to the forearm, of the forearm to the arm, and of everything to everything, as it is written in the Canon of Polykleitos. There was no single magic number: every part had to fit every other part, from the smallest up to the whole figure.
The statue called “the Canon”
Polykleitos did not leave only a book. Pliny the Elder lists among his bronzes the Diadoumenos, a youth tying a ribbon round his head, the Doryphoros, a young spear-bearer, and a statue “the artists have called the Model”, the Canon, which they studied as a sort of standard. Modern scholars usually identify that model with the Doryphoros, though Pliny lists them separately and the point is debated. The bronze originals are lost; we know the figures from Roman marble copies, such as the Diadoumenos in the Metropolitan Museum and the one found on Delos.
The system had a price. Pliny also passes on the judgement that the statues of Polykleitos were “square-built” and very much alike.
Numbers you can check: Vitruvius
A Roman architect of the first century BCE, Vitruvius, gives a simpler set of measures, the kind a student can test with a ruler. In a well-shaped man, he writes, the face from chin to hairline is a tenth of the whole height, the head from chin to crown an eighth, and the foot a sixth. He adds that if a man lies on his back with arms and legs spread and a circle is drawn round his navel, it touches his fingers and toes, and that his height equals his outstretched arms, so the figure also fits a square. The same proportion of the foot to the height, one to six, was the one he gave for the Doric column.
A new canon: Lysippos
Canons change. In the fourth century BCE Lysippos, the court sculptor of Alexander the Great, made the head smaller and the body slimmer and less bulky, so his statues looked taller. He used to say, according to Pliny, that other artists made men as they were, while he made them as they appeared to be. The Hellenistic age liked the result: a terracotta statuette in the Metropolitan Museum, made in the first century BCE, keeps the pose of Polykleitos’s Diadoumenos but gives it slender forms in the later taste.
Was the canon based on the golden ratio?
You will often read that the Greek ideal body follows the golden ratio, about 1.618. Is that what Polykleitos used? There is no evidence for it. The ancient descriptions speak of each part fitting the others, finger to finger and limb to limb, and the numbers that survive, a tenth, an eighth, a sixth, are simple fractions. None of these sources mentions the golden ratio, so the claim is a modern reading, not an ancient rule.
Where to see it
The Metropolitan Museum in New York shows a Roman marble copy of the Diadoumenos and the Hellenistic terracotta version; the Diadoumenos found on Delos is in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. Check opening times before you go.
Sources
- C. Hemingway and S. Hemingway, “The Art of Classical Greece (ca. 480-323 B.C.)”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2008).
- Galen, On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato 5.3, reporting Chrysippus on the Canon of Polykleitos.
- Pliny the Elder, Natural History 34.55-56 and 34.65 (Bostock 34.19); Vitruvius, On Architecture 3.1.2-3 and 4.1.6 (Perseus; LacusCurtius).
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection records 25.78.56 and 32.11.2. Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, Odysseus: Diadoumenos of Delos (1826).
