Perfection by design: a system of proportions
Greek artists of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, the Classical period, found a way of representing the body that conveys the vitality of life together with a sense of permanence, clarity and harmony. The effect was no accident, and one man made it teachable. Polykleitos of Argos became famous for a system of proportions that achieved it and allowed others to reproduce it. He wrote a treatise on it, the Canon, which is lost, and he made a statue that artists studied, in the words of Pliny the Elder, “as from a sort of standard”.
So “perfect” here has a precise meaning: every part of the body is measured against the others, like the notes of a scale, and the result can be repeated.
A body in balance
Proportion alone would give a handsome diagram. What makes the figures feel alive is the pose. In the Diadoumenos of Polykleitos, a youth tying a victor’s ribbon round his head, the chest and the pelvis tilt in opposite directions, setting up a rhythm of contrasts in the torso, and the feet are placed between standing and walking, so the figure seems about to move. This calculated pose, the contrapposto, appears in almost all the works attributed to Polykleitos and became a standard formula of Graeco-Roman and later European art.
It had started a generation earlier, in the Kritios Boy from the Acropolis, made after 480 BCE, who already rests his weight on one leg. The Classical sculptors turned that discovery into a rule.
Temples built like statues
The same thinking governed buildings. A Greek architectural order fixed the relationships between all the parts of a building, so that every piece was integral to the whole: a fragment of moulding can often be used to reconstruct an entire temple. The Parthenon (447-438 BCE) adds subtle refinements: its platform and entablature curve slightly upwards in the middle, and its columns swell a little halfway up, the entasis that the Roman architect Vitruvius explained as a correction for the way the eye shrinks the upper part of a column.
Was it all white marble?
No, and this is the biggest difference between Classical art as the Greeks saw it and as we see it. The fifty statues of the Parthenon’s pediments, carved in Pentelic marble, were originally enriched with colourful paint and metal accessories. Bronze, valued for its strength and its lustre, was the favourite material for freestanding statues, and very few bronze originals survive. The cool white perfection of the museums is partly the work of time, which has removed the paint, and of the loss of almost all the bronzes, as research on painted statues keeps showing.
Copied for two thousand years
The last reason is the simplest: we have been taught to see these works as perfect. Connoisseurship, and the very beginnings of art history, go back to the Hellenistic period, when Greek statues of the fifth century BCE, above all those of Polykleitos and Pheidias, were sought out and frequently copied. A terracotta statuette in the Metropolitan Museum, made in the first century BCE, repeats the pose of Polykleitos’s Diadoumenos in slimmer forms that suit Late Hellenistic taste. Then Roman patrons ordered marble copies, and most of what we know of the famous Classical bronzes comes from those copies and from ancient writers.
So why does Classical art look perfect? Because its makers built it on measured proportions and a balanced body, and because, for more than two thousand years, every later age that wanted a model of beauty went back and copied it.
Where to see it
In Athens, the Parthenon on the Acropolis and its sculptures in the Acropolis Museum, the Diadoumenos copy from Delos in the National Archaeological Museum. In New York, the Metropolitan Museum’s Greek and Roman galleries hold the marble and terracotta Diadoumenos and some of the finest Classical grave reliefs. Check opening times before you go.
Sources
- C. Hemingway and S. Hemingway, “The Art of Classical Greece (ca. 480-323 B.C.)” (2008) and C. Hemingway, “Architecture in Ancient Greece” (2003), Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection records 25.78.56 and 32.11.2.
- Pliny the Elder, Natural History 34.55 (Bostock 34.19); Vitruvius, On Architecture 3.3.13 (Perseus; LacusCurtius).
- Acropolis Museum, Athens, “The pediments”; “Kritios Boy” (Acr. 698). Acropolis Restoration Service (YSMA), “Parthenon”.
