(piano music playing) Steven: What is perfect?
Well, the ancient Greeks thought the human body
was perfect but, for them, it was not an individual that was perfect. It was almost mathematical precision, where the proportions of
every part of the body were perfect in
relationship to the others. Beth: We're looking at
an ancient Roman copy of a Greek bronze original
by the great artist, Polykleitos, who sought out
to demonstrate just that. What would perfect ideal beauty be, thinking about the
mathematical relationship of each part of the
human body to the other, and in relationship to the whole? Steven: This is a sculpture
called the Doryphorus. Doryphorus means a spear-bearer, and he would have,
originally, been holding a bronze spear. We call it the Doryphorus. Polykleitos apparently
called it Canon, not to mean a piece of armament, but
a kind of idealized form that could be studied and replicated. That is, a set of ideas that you followed. Beth: The idea that you could create a perfect human form, based on math, was really part of a bigger set of ideas for the Greeks. If we
think about Pythagoras, for example, Pythagoras discovered that harmony in music was based on the mathematical
relationship between the notes. Steven: In fact, Pythagoras
tried to understand the origin of all beauty through ratio and, so, it follows that the Greeks would be looking for
that in one of the forms that they felt were most beautiful, that is the human body. The Greeks would perform
their athletics nude, celebrating the body and
its physical abilities. But, even when they represented figures in noble pursuits, like this figure, we have a figure whose
clothes have been taken off. This is not because
soldiers went into battle nude in ancient Greece, but because this sculpture
is not about warfare. It's not a portrait of an individual. This is a sculpture that is about the perfection of human form. Beth: This was found in
a palestra in Pompeii, a place where athletes would work out, perhaps as a kind of inspiration for them. Steven: So, that's
another layer of meaning. The Romans loved Greek
art, and had it copied in marble very often, and even in a city like Pompeii, we found
thousands of sculptures that are copies of
ancient Greek originals. This is based on a sculpture that is at the very beginning
of the Classical Period, before the Parthenon sculptures, but it's after the Archaic figures, it's after the standing
figure that we know as the Kouros. Here, the
Greeks have turned away from the stiff renderings that had been so
characteristic of the Archaic, and have, instead, begun to examine the human body and
understand its physiognomy, This is one of the classic expressions of Contrapposto. Beth: The Doryphorus
stands on his right foot, his left leg is relaxed, the right leg is weight-bearing, but the left hand would have been weight-bearing the spear. Similarly, the right arm is relaxed, so there's a sense of counterbalancing and harmony in the
composition of the body. Steven: In a Kouros
figure, you have both feet firmly planted, although
one leg is forward, but, nevertheless, if
you were to draw a line between the ankles, they would still be
horizontal to the floor. Beth: And, in a Kouros,
the figure is symmetrical. Steven: Here, both of
those things have changed, and you see that his left ankle is up, and so you have a tilt of that axis, the axis of the knees are
tilted in the opposite way. The hips are parallel to
the axes of the knees, but also tipped, and
then look what happens as a result of that. In
those earlier figures, there was a perfect
symmetry, and a perfect line that could be drawn down
the center of the body. Here, there's a gentle S
curve, and you can see, for instance, that his
right side is compressed, compared to the left
side, because the left hip is literally hanging
down over that free leg. It's not being supported. Beth: To complete that sense of balance and harmony, Polykleitos
turned the head slightly, breaking that symmetry of the Archaic Kouros figures. With the invention of
Contrapposto by the Greeks, in the 5th century BCE, we would have, for the first time in Western art history, figures who seem fully alive, as though they move in the
world. They're like us. Steven: This is a sculpture that is, for all of the complexity of
what we've just discussed, is simply walking, but the mechanics of the human body walking are incredibly complicated,
and here we have a civilization that
not only was interested in understanding, through
careful observation, how the body moved, but were interested, culturally, in capturing that. We have a society that
puts human potential at the center. Beth: And creates figures
who are not transcendent, who don't exist in a separate world, but who exist in our world. They're, in a way, ideal
mirrors of ourselves. (piano music playing)