The
Doryphoros (
GreekGreek , an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, is the language of the Greeks. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. In its ancient form, it is the language of classical...
δορυφόρος, "Spear-Bearer";
LatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Roman conquest, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe...
ized as
Doryphorus) is one of the best known
Greek sculpturesAncient Greek sculpture is the sculpture of Ancient Greece.-Geometric:The origins of Greek sculpture have been ascribed to the wooden cult statues described by Pausanias as xoana. No such statue survives, and the descriptions of them are frustratingly vague despite the fact that some were objects...
of the classical era in Western Art and an early example of Greek classical
contrappostoContrapposto is an Italian term used in the visual arts to describe a human figure standing with most of its weight on one foot so that its shoulders and arms twist off-axis from the hips and legs. This gives the figure a more dynamic, or alternatively relaxed appearance...
. The lost bronze original would have been made at approximately 450-40 BCE.
The Greek sculptor
PolykleitosPolykleitos ; called the Elder, was a Greek sculptor in bronze of the fifth and the early fourth century BC...
designed a work, perhaps this one, as an example of the "
canonA canon in the sphere of visual arts and aesthetics, or an aesthetic canon, is a rule for proportions, so as to produce a harmoniously-formed figure.-Evolution:...
" or "rule", showing the perfectly harmonious and balanced proportions of the human body in the sculpted form.
The
Doryphoros (
GreekGreek , an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, is the language of the Greeks. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. In its ancient form, it is the language of classical...
δορυφόρος, "Spear-Bearer";
LatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Roman conquest, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe...
ized as
Doryphorus) is one of the best known
Greek sculpturesAncient Greek sculpture is the sculpture of Ancient Greece.-Geometric:The origins of Greek sculpture have been ascribed to the wooden cult statues described by Pausanias as xoana. No such statue survives, and the descriptions of them are frustratingly vague despite the fact that some were objects...
of the classical era in Western Art and an early example of Greek classical
contrappostoContrapposto is an Italian term used in the visual arts to describe a human figure standing with most of its weight on one foot so that its shoulders and arms twist off-axis from the hips and legs. This gives the figure a more dynamic, or alternatively relaxed appearance...
. The lost bronze original would have been made at approximately 450-40 BCE.
The Greek sculptor
PolykleitosPolykleitos ; called the Elder, was a Greek sculptor in bronze of the fifth and the early fourth century BC...
designed a work, perhaps this one, as an example of the "
canonA canon in the sphere of visual arts and aesthetics, or an aesthetic canon, is a rule for proportions, so as to produce a harmoniously-formed figure.-Evolution:...
" or "rule", showing the perfectly harmonious and balanced proportions of the human body in the sculpted form. A solid-built athlete with muscular features carries a spear balanced on his left shoulder. In the surviving Roman marble copies, a marble tree stump is added to support the weight of the marble. A characteristic of Polykleitos' Doryphoros is the classical
contrappostoContrapposto is an Italian term used in the visual arts to describe a human figure standing with most of its weight on one foot so that its shoulders and arms twist off-axis from the hips and legs. This gives the figure a more dynamic, or alternatively relaxed appearance...
in the pelvis; the figure's stance is such that one leg seems to be in movement while he is standing on the other.
Some time in the second century CE,
GalenAelius Galenus or Claudius Galenus , better known as Galen of Pergamum , was a prominent Greek physician and philosopher and probably the most accomplished medical researcher of the Roman period. His theories dominated and influenced Western medical science for well over a millennium...
wrote about the Doryphoros as the perfect visual expression of the Greeks' search for harmony and beauty, which is rendered in the perfectly proportioned sculpted male nude:
Chrysippos holds beauty to consist not in the commensurability or "symmetria" [ie proportions] of the constituent elements [of the body], but in the commensurability of the parts, such as that of finger to finger, and of all the fingers to the palm and wrist, and of those to the forearm, and of the forearm to the upper arm, and in fact, of everything to everything else, just as it is written in the Canon of Polyclitus. For having taught us in that work all the proportions of the body, Polyclitus supported his treatise with a work: he made a statue according to the tenets of his treatise, and called the statue, like the work, the 'Canon.
The sculpture was known through the Roman marble replica found in
Herculaneumthumb|240px|The towns and villages under the likely pyroclastic cloud of the [[Mt Vesuvius]] 79 AD eruption. Herculaneum is visible along the northwestern edge of the shadowed area...
and conserved in the
Naples National Archaeological MuseumThe Naples National Archaeological Museum is a museum in Naples, southern Italy, at the northwest corner of the original Greek wall of the city of Neapolis. The museum contains a large collection of Roman artifacts from Pompeii, Stabiae and Herculaneum...
, but, according to Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, early connoisseurs such as
Johann Joachim WinckelmannJohann Joachim Winckelmann a German art historian and archaeologist, was a pioneering Hellenist who first articulated the difference between Greek, Greco-Roman and Roman art...
passed it by in the royal Bourbon collection at Naples without notable comment. The marble sculpture and a bronze head that had been retrieved at
Herculaneumthumb|240px|The towns and villages under the likely pyroclastic cloud of the [[Mt Vesuvius]] 79 AD eruption. Herculaneum is visible along the northwestern edge of the shadowed area...
were published in Le Antichità di Ercolano
, (1767) but were not identified as representing Polyclitos' Doryphorus
until 1863.
For modern eyes, a fragmentary Doryphoros
torso in basaltBasalt is a common extrusive volcanic rock. It is usually grey to black and fine-grained due to rapid cooling of lava at the surface of a planet. It may be porphyritic containing larger crystals in a fine matrix, or vesicular, or frothy scoria. Unweathered basalt is black or grey.On Earth, most...
in the MediciThe House of Medici was a political dynasty, banking family and later royal house who first began to gather prominence under Cosimo de' Medici in the Republic of Florence during the late 14th century. The family originated in the Mugello region of the Tuscan countryside, gradually rising until...
collection at the UffiziThe Uffizi Gallery , is one of the oldest and most famous art museums of the Western world. It's housed in the Palazzo degli Uffizi, a palazzo in Florence, Italy.-History:...
"conveys the effect of bronze, and is executed with unusual care", as Kenneth ClarkKenneth McKenzie Clark, Baron Clark, OM, CH, KCB, FBA was a British author, museum director, broadcaster, and one of the best-known art historians of his generation...
noted, illustrating it in The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form: "It preserves some of the urgency and concentration of the original" lost in the full-size "blockish" marble copies.
Other uses
The canonic proportions of the male torso established by Polykleitos ossified in Hellenistic and Roman times in the
heroic cuirassCuirass , the plate armour, is formed of a single piece of metal or other rigid material or composed of two or more pieces, which covers the front of the wearer's person...
exemplified by the
Augustus of Prima PortaAugustus of Prima Porta is a 2.04m high marble statue of Augustus Caesar which was discovered on April 20, 1863 in the Villa of Livia at Prima Porta, near Rome. His wife Livia Drusilla retired to the villa after his death...
, who wears ceremonial dress armor modelled in relief over an idealized muscular torso which is ostensibly modelled on the Doryphoros.
In
Modern GreekModern Greek refers to the varieties of Greek spoken in the modern era. The beginning of the "modern" period of the language is often symbolically assigned to the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, even though that date marks no clear linguistic boundary and many characteristic modern features...
, the term doryphoros
means "satelliteIn the context of spaceflight, a satellite is an object which has been placed into orbit by human endeavor. Such objects are sometimes called artificial satellites to distinguish them from natural satellites such as the Moon....
"; the term φυσική δορυφόρος (physike doryphoros) is used for
natural satelliteA natural satellite or moon is a celestial body that orbits a planet or smaller body, which is called the primary. Technically, the term natural satellite could refer to a planet orbiting a star, or a dwarf galaxy orbiting a major galaxy, but it is normally synonymous with moon and used to identify...
s, while an artificial satellite is a τεχνητός δορυφόρος (tekhnetos doryphoros).