Polykleitos’ Doryphoros: Why This Statue Became a Model

A young man with a spear

The figure is simple to describe. A naked young man stands with his weight on the right leg, while the left leg is drawn back with only the toes on the ground. The right arm hangs at his side; the left is bent, and once held the spear that gives the statue its name. There is no action, no story and no attribute that names him: he could be an athlete, a warrior or a hero.

What makes him a model is the way the parts answer one another. The leg that carries the weight is matched by the arm that hangs relaxed; the leg that rests is matched by the arm that works. Hips and shoulders tilt in opposite directions. The pose, known as contrapposto, makes a standing figure look as though it could take its next step, and Polykleitos built it with a system.

The statue and the Canon

Polykleitos, who was active between about 460 and 415 BCE, also wrote a treatise on the proportions of the body, called the Canon, now lost. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century CE, lists among his works the Doryphoros, “a youth full of manly vigour”, and separately a statue that artists called the Canon and studied as a standard, as if one work could contain the whole of the art. Many modern scholars identify that statue with the Doryphoros; since Pliny lists the two separately, the identification remains a hypothesis.

Either way, the principle is clear from the statue itself: every part has a measured relation to every other, from the fingers to the whole body. Pliny also credits Polykleitos with discovering how to make statues rest their weight on one leg, and reports the Roman scholar Varro’s comment that his figures were “square-built”, sturdy and broad.

A lost bronze, many marble copies

The original was bronze, and it is lost. We know it through Roman marble copies, made centuries later for Roman patrons. Marble is heavier and weaker than bronze, so the copyists added a tree-trunk support beside the legs, a feature of the copies that the bronze did not need.

The best-known copy comes from Pompeii. The Pompeians placed it in the courtyard of the Samnite Palaestra, the exercise ground where men and boys trained, to stress the athletic and military character of the building; it was excavated in the late eighteenth century and is now in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples. Another full-size copy, in Pentelic marble, is in the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Why it mattered

The Doryphoros became famous through copies. The Romans had it copied in marble, as the Pompeii palaestra shows, and after the copies were rediscovered, plaster casts carried it into universities: Cambridge bought its cast from the casting workshop of the Naples museum in 1884. In a cast gallery a student can walk round it and see, part by part, how a standing body is balanced.

Where to see it

The Pompeii Doryphoros is in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples. The Minneapolis Institute of Art shows a full marble copy, and plaster casts can be seen in university cast collections, including the Museum of Classical Archaeology in Cambridge. Check opening times before you go.

Sources

• Pliny the Elder, Natural History 34.55-56, trans. J. Bostock and H. T. Riley (Perseus Digital Library).
• Parco Archeologico di Pompei, “Samnite Palaestra”.
• Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Doryphoros (after Polykleitos), 86.6; University of Edinburgh, Classics cast collection, “Doryphoros”; Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge, “Doryphoros” (cast 181).
• 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).