Who was Polykleitos?
He worked in the middle and second half of the fifth century BCE, a little younger than Pheidias. The sources disagree on his city: modern museums call him Polykleitos of Argos, while Pliny the Elder calls him “of Sicyon” and a pupil of the sculptor Agelades. Either way he belonged to the Peloponnese, and his workshop made mostly bronze statues of athletes and gods.
His reputation was enormous. Ancient critics considered that he had reached the highest excellence in sculpture, and a famous story shows how his colleagues saw him. Several sculptors, Pliny writes, made statues of Amazons for the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, and the judging was left to the artists themselves: each named his own work first and someone else’s second. The statue placed second by the most votes won. First came Polykleitos, then Pheidias, then Kresilas, Kydon and Phradmon.
What did he make?
Pliny lists his best-known bronzes. There was the Diadoumenos, a youth tying a ribbon round his head, “remarkable for having cost one hundred talents”; the Doryphoros, a young spear-bearer “full of manly vigour”; and a statue that artists called the Model, the Canon, which they studied as a standard. He also made a man using a body-scraper and boys playing at dice.
His most precious work was not in bronze at all. In the sanctuary of Hera near Argos stood his seated Hera, huge and made of gold and ivory, with a crown decorated with the Graces and the Seasons, a pomegranate in one hand and a sceptre topped by a cuckoo in the other. It is lost, like all the gold and ivory giants of antiquity.
What was the Canon?
The treatise is lost, so we know its logic better than its numbers. Polykleitos formulated a system of proportions that gave his statues both a sense of life and of permanence, clarity and harmony, and that allowed others to reproduce the effect. A later report preserved by the physician Galen puts the principle in one line: beauty lies in the commensurability of the parts, finger to finger, fingers to palm and wrist, and so on up to the whole body. The details are in the guide to the canon of proportions.
The proportions went together with a pose. In his statues the chest and the pelvis tilt in opposite directions, the weight rests on one leg and the feet are placed between standing and walking; this calculated contrapposto appears in almost all the works attributed to him. Pliny went as far as to credit him with the discovery of placing statues on one leg, although the Kritios Boy shows the pose a generation earlier.
A rulebook with a price
Not everyone loved the system. Pliny passes on the view of the Roman scholar Varro that Polykleitos’s statues were “square-built” and all very much alike. That is the risk of any formula: it makes excellence repeatable, and it makes repetition visible. Later sculptors changed the recipe, Lysippos above all, with smaller heads and slimmer bodies, but they changed it by measuring themselves against Polykleitos.
Where to see his work
No original by Polykleitos survives. The Metropolitan Museum in New York has a Roman marble copy of the Diadoumenos and a Hellenistic terracotta version; the National Archaeological Museum in Athens has the Diadoumenos found on Delos. Check opening times before you go.
Sources
- Pliny the Elder, Natural History 34.53-56 (Bostock 34.19); Pausanias, Description of Greece 2.17.4 (Perseus Digital Library).
- 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).
- 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).
- Galen, On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato 5.3.
