Male Nude Art

Anthropometric portrayals of the human figure in Eastern and Western art have served as a basis to evaluate the cultural and time-bound specificity of concepts of beauty. In many cultures, concepts of beauty were often encapsulated in nude figures, because they were idealised artistic creations which conveyed the ethos of that time. Sculpted and painted images of the human body- be it Greek, Egyptian or Indian- not only reflect the institutions and behaviours of life as it was actually lived, but also suggested the kind of social constructs established within these different cultures. The Western disposition is premised upon the classical Greek tenet that the idealized perfection of the physical denotes the model of divine beauty, whereas the

As the Greeks considered athletic male youths (kouroi) to be specimens of physical superiority, it was perfectly natural for the Greeks to associate the male nude form with triumph, glory, and moral excellence, values which seem immanent in the magnificent nudes of Greek sculpture. In the archaic period, the kouroi were then fabrications of an idealized humanity defined as male, youthful, and heroically nude.The correspondent female korai are, on the contrary, consistently draped. As the treatment of the male anatomy continued into fifth century Classicism, it culminated in Polykleitos's Doryphoros (Fig.1) The iconic Doryphoros not only typified a new approach to depicting an idealized form of the male nude where the classical Greek contrapposto stance and classical realism is exemplified, but also presents a distinct departure from the oversimplified, rigid and somewhat primitive archaic Kouros (Fig.2), which stand rigidly in an unnatural stance derived from their Egyptian predecessors.. Polykleitos achieved a level of life-likeness and realism of the human anatomy by using the 1:7 ratio, rules of proportion which were considered perfectly harmonious and balanced proportions of the human body in the sculpted form. The pronunciation of the S-curve; the exaggeration of the hip and shift of weight to the right leg, help to create the impression of motion in a stationary figure. As such, the articulation of the contrapposto stance reflected how the Greeks’ experimentation with their art form went hand in hand with their scientific discoveries, resulting in Greece as the forefront of mathematical precision and rational