Diodoumenos’ marble statue is about 73 inches tall, made by Greek sculptor Polykleitos. This is a contrapposto, representing a youth in an athletic contest that is adorning his head with a fillet (band) after a victory. Contrapposto is the pose taken by the human body when relaxed and in a standing position. It was the ancient Greeks who invented this pose in the west and by this time, artists had figured out how the body could be observed and naturally represented. The Greeks had previously produced a series of standing figures, such as the Kouros, from around the Archaic period of 500 BCE and are the first culture in the west, to create such naturalistic images of the human figure. (Timeline of Art History, 2015)
Polykleitos divides the body in seven parts. The thorax and pelvis tilt in opposite directions in this figure, enabling the torso in a rhythmic contrast that creates an impression of organic vitality. The feet’s position is positioned between standing and walking; giving a sense of potential movement and appearing to be lost in thinking. This calculated pose, can be found in nearly all the works of Polykleitos. This copy of Diadoumenos that is on display at The Met: only the arms, legs, head, from the knees down and the tree trunk, are the original pieces of this statue. The rest of the body was made from a cast from a marble copy on display in Athens, Greece’s Nation Museum. Polykleitos’s original sculpture was cast in bronze, but the original was lost. Bronze sculptures were sometimes melted when their style fell out of favor or when metal was needed for other use, such as weaponry. Luckily, before the bronze was destroyed, this Roman artist copied the original in the marble material for us. For the support we see in this work, the much harder and more durable metal sculpture would not have required the carved tree trunk. (Giusti, n.d.)
Around 450 BCE, Polykleitos created a method called ‘The Canon’. It came from the Greek word kanon meaning measure, rule, or law. Scholars believed that Diodoumenos was based on the unit ratio and the length of different parts of the body. Its height is exactly seven times the head’s height. The distance to the naval from the top of his head is the same as the distance to the knee from the naval. It’s the same from the base of the neck to the naval, as from the knee to the toe. There are many more similar proportions, which are part of Polykleitos’ elaborate canon.
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The Greeks celebrate the body and its physical abilities by performing athletics in nude. Therefore, Diodoumenos is an unclothed figure, because this sculpture is not about warfare, and figures without clothes are common in the Western art world. Naked figures in art, however, relate very little to these humble conditions, reflecting instead a very complex set of formal ideals, philosophical concerns, and cultural traditions. (Simon, 2015) While meaningful throughout Western art’s sweep, the nude has been a special focus of artistic innovation in the Renaissance and later centuries. The Greeks were more focused on the athlete’s nobility and the human body itself, which is why so many Greek sculptures are shown in the nude. Marilyn Stockstad in Art: A Brief History wrote, “In the statue he made to illustrate his treatise, he explored not only proportions but also the relationships among weight-bearing and relaxed legs and arms in a perfectly balanced figure. The cross-balancing of supporting and free elements in a figure is sometimes referred to as contrapposto.” (Stockstad 110). So here we see this young man’s idealized fit, muscular body as he stands at ease. There is an interest in this time’s Greek art to show people as calm, rational, and in control. In fact, this was a time when the Greeks themselves felt very much in world control, as they had recently expelled the invading Persians from the ancient Greece, and were constantly making discoveries about the world around them.
Polykleitos influenced artists by making nude figures more popular, along with poised rhythmic poses, and male and female heads with a characteristic rounded structure and a full oval face. He made this sculpture in a way that could be studied and replicated in an idealized form; the idea that a perfect human form based on math could be created. Greek sculptors sought to embody beauty in a credible way, as they had the desire to find the underlying rational systems of everything around them. They seek a balance between the representation regulation and the human body’s realism. But, one of their rules was to avoid excessive detail. It is necessary to take care of simplicity, not in a serious way, but in a serene way. Thinking that the ancient Greek sculptures were displayed as bright, white marble objects is a misunderstanding. All temples and sculptures were painted in varied, vivid colors. (Hart, 2018) In making temples, Greeks used a measurement system and also tried to use a standard measurement unit to draw the human body.
Kroisos Kouros, ca. 530 BC.
The Diodoumenos is based on a sculpture after the Archaic figures, it’s after the symmetrical standing figure that we know as the Kouros. Here, the Greeks turned away from the rigid renderings that were so characteristic of the Archaic, and instead started to examine the human body and understand its physiognomy. We see that both feet are firmly planted in the Kouros figure, although one leg is in front, but if you were to draw a line between the ankles, they would still be horizontal to the ground. His left ankle is up, so you’ve got a tilt of that axis, the knee axis is tilted in the opposite direction. The hips are parallel to the knee axes, but they are tipped as well. There was a perfect symmetry in the figure, and a perfect line could be drawn down the body’s center. Because the figure’s weight is equally placed on both feet, this was not standing in contrapposto. His weight is equally placed with one foot in front of the other and the knees are locked. This causes a sense of timelessness because of the symmetrical body, like a mirror.
Whereas, in the Diodoumenos, we have the figure looking to the right and the weight-bearing leg has a hip that juts up, it pushes upward, compressing the side. His left side, above the free leg, is longer than the right side, allowing the hips to sag. And so there’s a kind of hanging and expanding of the side. This results in a vertebrae swing and a complex alignment resulting from this opposition between one side of the body and the other. Also, it enables our eyes to visualize a gentle S curve in the Diodoumenos. Polykleitos turned the head slightly to complete that sense of balance and harmony, breaking that symmetry of the archaic Kouros figures.
In my opinion, I don’t think the artist was looking at a live model when making the Kouros. But the Diodoumenos was a sculpture based on a human body’s observation because the artist definitely observed the human body and looked specifically at the body’s forms, muscles, and bone structure. (Britannica, n.d.) In my judgment, with the Greeks’ invention of Contrapposto in the 5th century BCE, for the first time in Western art history, we have figures that seem to be alive as if they were moving around the world. This is a sculpture belongs to a civilization that not only was interested in understanding, through careful observation, how the body moved, but were interested, culturally, in capturing that. It’s fascinating to me that the Greeks were the first Western culture to decide to make a human figure that existed as we do in the world. The Kouros figure does not appear to be at all engaging with the world around it. However, there is a sense that Diodoumenos responds to stimuli around him and he’s turned his head to look at something. When we look at Diodoumenos, we see ourselves. We see an explosion in literature, philosophy, a self-conscious culture that pushes human knowledge’s boundaries. Art historians and admirers of classical art must rely on Roman copies such as this version of Diadoumenos to interpret and enjoy works of the period.
Works Cited
- Britannica, T. E. (n.d.). Kouros Greek Sculpture. Retrieved from Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/art/kouros
- Giusti, G. (n.d.). Blog. Retrieved from Word Press: https://giacobbegiusti.wordpress.com/category/best-of-art/page/3/
- Hart, K. (2018, April 10). Why Do People Still Think That Classical Sculptures Were Meant to Be White? Retrieved from Artsy: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-people-classical-sculptures-meant-white
- Simon. (2015, April 3). Defining beauty: the body in ancient Greek art. Retrieved from WordPress: https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/defining-beauty-the-body-in-ancient-greek-art-british-museum/
- Timeline of Art History, H. (2015, June 24). Statue of Diadoumenos. Retrieved from Metropolitan Museum of Art: https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/25.78.56/
