CIRCA 1ST CENTURY B.C.-1ST CENTURY A.D.

The powerfully sculpted musculature on this torso recalls the works of Polykleitos, who was considered to be one of the greatest and most influential sculptors of the High Classical period. Coming from Argos in the Peloponnesus, his artistic career flourished circa 450-420 B.C., and he founded a workshop in Olympia that lasted for three generations. He is most famous for producing a canon that set out the precise geometry and standards of proportion needed to create the perfect male nude and to achieve within the statue symmetria (commensurability)-- the perfect symmetry of all parts of the statue to one another and to the whole. The master of the mortal rather than the deity, his canon achieved a male body "powerfully muscled, proportioned with meticulous exactitude, composed around precisely calculated cross-relationships between weight-bearing and free, tense and relaxed, flexed and straight, and finished with painstaking care, it emerges as a paradigm of measured humanity" (A. Stewart, Greek Sculpture, vol. 1, p. 14).