The ideal man. The Doryphorus (spear-carrier) by Polyclitus. Roman marble copy of a Greek bronze original of about 440
B.C. The original was known as the 'Canon' and had been used by the artist to display his views about the ideal proportions
for the human figure. The type differs from the Phidian (as on the Parthenon) and was on the whole more influential in
antiquity. The tree trunk and struts are the copyist's additions.
We measure the world around us, ourselves included, in feet. The human body is the natural, common reference point for
measurement, and the non-Greek world had devised complicated systems of measurement interrelating width of finger, of
palm, length of forearm (cubit), foot, and so on in proportion and multiples that approximated to nature. Before life became
the model, if an artist wished to draw a human figure at any scale, preparing to sculpt it, for example, he would have
recourse to the hierarchy of measure, and in Egypt this was rationalized into a simple grid on which the human body could
be drawn in a plausible form. This appealed to the Greeks, but they were soon concerned less with absolute ideal
measurement than with proportion, and sought to express a theoretical basis for this ideal. Polyclitus, the fifth-century
sculptor, wrote a book on the subject which he illustrated by a statue (his Doryphorus or Canon-'rule'). It expressed his
views on symmetria, the commensurability of parts of the body. The notion seems mechanical, but his figures, known to us
only in copies, were clearly no less life-like than those of his contemporaries. This controlling principle in Greek art appears