It appears that Polyclitus (pah-lee-KLIE-tuhs) came from Sicyon (SIK-ee-ahn), a city-state on the Gulf of Corinth. In many ways, his career mirrors that of his classmate Phidias. Phidias created the gold and ivory statue of Zeus at Olympia; Polyclitus designed a similarly composed statue of Zeus's wife, the goddess Hera, in Argos (AHR-gohs). People said, in fact, that Polyclitus's statue was surpassed only by that of Phidias'.
Bust of Polyclitus.
The Granger Collection, New York. Reproduced by permission.
Later, the two participated, along with two other sculptors, in a competition to create a statue of Artemis (AHR-teh-mis) for her temple at Ephesus [see sidebar]. According to legend, they were allowed to vote. Naturally, each of the sculptors named his own statue the best.
But each—Polyclitus included, presumably— named Polyclitus's statue second-best; therefore he won the competition. In fact statues by all four stood in the temple.
Polyclitus seems to have been influenced by the philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras, who was especially concerned with the idea of proportion. Likewise Polyclitus believed that there should be a table of exact proportions (what he called the “canon”) for the parts of the body, so that a sculptor could know with certainty, for instance, that a human figure's head should be a certain size in relation to its feet.
His Doryphoros (dohr-IF-ohr-ohs), or Spear Bearer, is practically an encyclopedia of the canon. The idea of a canon would persist in sculpture thereafter, though it would not necessarily be Polyclitus's canon. Thus in Byzantine times, for instance, people were routinely represented with extraordinarily long bodies, evidence that the artists of that age had lost the ability to “see” the human figure.
World History
