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The Doryphoros: The Perfect Human Body

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The work on the right of Anavysos Kouros is the Doryphoros, c. 450-440 B.C.E, a Roman marble copy of a Greek bronze sculpture. This work is from the Classical Period of ancient Greece immediately following the Archaic Period. Polykleitos is the artist responsible for this work and he described it as the “ Canon” meaning an idealized form that could be studied and replicated. Doryphoros means a spear bearer and is a free-standing nude male sculpture. The Doryphoros, according to Doctors Beth Harris and Steven Zucker, “was one of the most sought-after, and most copied, Greek sculptures.” Because of Polykleitos’s idea of relating beauty to ratio and mathematical precision, the Doryphoros represents the ideal perfect human body where all the parts of the body are in proportion to each other and the body as a whole. …show more content…

The work is incredibly detailed and idealized. When looking at the sculpture, one can see how muscular the body is, the details of the hair, the almost bleak expression of the face, and the overall relaxed pose in which the sculpture stands. Every muscle is displayed and is perfect in size, shape, and length in relation to the body. The hair is sculpted in such a way where it is possible to point numerous strands and the type of hair altogether. The left arm is positioned as if there was something being held which would be the spear that the Doryphoros originally

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According to Getty.edu, the art piece was named after Lord Lansdowne, a British noble who displayed the statue in his estate in London. The origins of the statue are unknown but speculated to be a Roman copy made from the famous school of Polykleitos. Workshops during ancient times tasked aspiring students with the menial labor of creating backgrounds and most of the form of sculptures; the masters finishing them up with the fine details such as the face and especially hands. Many Romans were quite fond of Greek culture and art, emulating and duplicating them on numerous occasions.

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The sculpture Doryphoros or “Spear Bearer” was created by sculptor Polykleitos in the Early Classical Period around 450-440 B.C.E out of bronze but was later recreated out of marble material. The ancient Greeks thought the human body was perfect, not the body itself, but how the mathematical proportions of every part of the body were in perfect relationship to the others. Polykleitos set out to capture what would perfect ideal beauty be? The idea that you could create a perfect body based on math was part of a bigger set of beliefs for the Greeks.

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