Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
An artistic canon of body proportions (or aesthetic canon of proportion), in the sphere of visual arts, is a formally codified set of criteria deemed mandatory for a particular artistic style of figurative art.
The 4th century BCE catalogue attributed to Xenocrates (the "Xenocratic catalogue"), which was Pliny's guide in matters of art, ranked him between Pheidias and Myron. [2] He is particularly known for his lost treatise, the Canon of Polykleitos (a canon of body proportions), which set out his mathematical basis of an idealised male body shape.
Body proportions is the study of artistic anatomy, which attempts to explore the relation of the elements of the human body to each other and to the whole. These ratios are used in depictions of the human figure and may become part of an artistic canon of body proportion within a culture.
The renowned Greek sculptor Polykleitos designed a sculptural work as a demonstration of his written treatise, entitled the Κανών (or 'Canon'), translated as "measure" or "rule"), exemplifying what he considered to be the perfectly harmonious and balanced proportions of the human body in the sculpted form.
Around 455 B.C., Myron, a sculptor of the transition, created his Discobolus, a work that already shows a more advanced degree of naturalism, and soon after, around 450 B.C., Polykleitos consolidated a new canon of proportions, a synthesis that convincingly expressed the beauty, harmony and vitality of the body and gave it an aspect of eternity ...
In his Historia Naturalis, Pliny the elder wrote that Lysippos introduced a new canon into art: capita minora faciendo quam antiqui, corpora graciliora siccioraque, per qum proceritas signorum major videretur, [6] [a] signifying "a canon of bodily proportions essentially different from that of Polykleitos". [8]
In recent years, increased public interest in untold aspects in art history and less rigid curatorial programs have put the artistic canon — with its Eurocentric compass, its predilection for ...
Greek art emphasized humanism along with the human mind and the human body's beauty. [8] Greek youths trained and competed in athletic contests in the nude. A great contribution to the contrapposto pose was the concept of a canon of proportions, in which mathematical properties are used to create proportions. [9]