Weight on one leg
The change happens in a single statue. The Kritios Boy, a marble youth from the Acropolis made after 480 BCE, rests his weight on his left leg and lets the right one go loose, bent at the knee. For more than a century Greek statues had stood on two stiff legs; now one carries the load and the other relaxes, the way you stand when you wait for someone.
A generation later Polykleitos of Argos turned this into a system. In his Diadoumenos, a young victor tying a ribbon round his head, known from Roman marble copies, the chest and the pelvis tilt in opposite directions, setting up contrasts in the torso that give an impression of organic life, and the feet are placed between standing and walking. This calculated pose, the contrapposto, appears in almost all works attributed to him and became a standard formula of Western art.
Measured bodies
Life also came from measure. Polykleitos was famous for a system of proportions that made the effect repeatable, set out in a treatise, the Canon, now lost. Every part of the body was measured against the others. In the fourth century the measures changed: Lysippos, according to Pliny the Elder, made heads smaller and bodies slimmer, so his statues looked taller, and he liked to say that others made men as they were, while he made them as they appeared to be.
Drapery that shows the body
Clothes became a second skin. On a grave stele in the Metropolitan Museum, carved around 450-440 BCE in marble from Paros, a little girl takes leave of her pet doves; her peplos is unbelted and falls open at the side, and its folds clearly reveal how she stands. The sculptor may have been one of the island carvers who gathered in Athens in those years to decorate the Parthenon.
Bronze: the favourite material
Many of the greatest Classical statues were cast in bronze, valued for its tensile strength and its lustrous beauty. Strength mattered: a bronze arm can stretch out into empty space without breaking, as in the god from Artemision (about 460 BCE, 2.09 metres), who throws his whole body into one gesture. Very few bronze originals of the fifth century survive, and most of what we know of the famous ones comes from ancient writers and from later Roman copies in marble. The few survivors, the Charioteer, the god of Artemision, the youth from the Antikythera shipwreck (340-330 BCE), show what has been lost.
Marble statues were not left bare either. The fifty figures of the Parthenon pediments were originally finished with colourful paint and metal accessories. Imagine them painted and you are closer to what an Athenian saw.
The fourth century: softer and slimmer
After the Peloponnesian War the style changed again. An elegant, calligraphic manner in late fifth-century sculpture gave way to a sober grandeur, and then to the most daring statue of the age: the nude Aphrodite of Knidos by Praxiteles, which broke the long convention that a female figure was shown clothed. Its slender proportions and distinctive contrapposto became hallmarks of fourth-century sculpture. So how did the Greeks make bodies feel alive? By weight, measure, cloth and material, and by refining each of them, generation after generation.
Where to see it
In Athens, the Kritios Boy and the Parthenon sculptures are in the Acropolis Museum, the bronzes of Artemision and Antikythera in the National Archaeological Museum. The Charioteer is in the museum at Delphi. The Metropolitan Museum in New York has the grave stele of the little girl and Roman copies of Polykleitos. 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).
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection records 27.45 and 25.78.56.
- Acropolis Museum, Athens: Kritios Boy (Acr. 698); “The pediments”.
- Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, Odysseus: Charioteer of Delphi; Zeus or Poseidon of Artemision; youth from Antikythera.
- Pliny the Elder, Natural History 34.65 (Bostock 34.19), Perseus Digital Library.
