. c. 480 BCE, was the first known Greek statue to use contrapposto''.
Classical Prior to the introduction of
contrapposto, the statues that dominated ancient Greece were the
archaic kouros (male) and the
kore (female). The first known statue to use
contrapposto is
Kritios Boy, c. 480 BCE, so called because it was once attributed to the sculptor
Kritios. It is possible, even likely, that earlier bronze statues had used the technique, but if they did, they have not survived and
Kenneth Clark called the statue "the first beautiful nude in art". The statue is a Greek marble original and not a Roman copy. According to the
canon of the Classical Greek sculptor
Polykleitos in the 4th century BCE,
contrapposto is one of the most important characteristics of his figurative works and those of his successors,
Lysippos,
Skopas, etc. The Polykletian statues (
Discophoros ("discus-bearer") and
Doryphoros ("spear-bearer"), for example) are idealized athletic young men with the divine sense, and captured in
contrapposto. In these works, the pelvis is no longer
axial with the
vertical kourous archaic style of earlier Greek sculpture before
Kritios Boy.
Contrapposto can be clearly seen in the
Roman copies of the statues of
Hermes and
Heracles. A famous example is the marble statue of
Hermes and the Infant Dionysus in
Olympia by
Praxiteles. It can also be seen in the Roman copies of Polyclitus's
Amazon. Greek art emphasized humanism along with the human mind and the human body's beauty. 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.
Renaissance Classical
contrapposto was revived in
Renaissance art by the Italian artists
Donatello and
Leonardo da Vinci, followed by
Michelangelo,
Raphael and other artists of the
High Renaissance. One of the achievements of the
Italian Renaissance was the re-discovery of
contrapposto.
Modern times The technique continues to be widely employed in sculpture. Modern psychological research confirms the attractiveness of the pose. ==Examples==