Lower body of a youth

The naturalistic representation of the human form, especially the nude male body, was perhaps the greatest achievement of Greek art, dominating Classical sculpture from the fifth century B.C. into the Roman period. These two statues demonstrate how popular representational formats, known as sculpture types, were appreciated, adapted, and replicated throughout antiquity.The marble torso seen here, a work of the Roman period, was heavily influenced by one of the most fa-mous sculptures of antiquity, the Doryphoros (Spear Bearer) by Polykleitos (see fig. 2, p. 14), a prominent Greek artist of the fifth century B.C., who wrote a treatise on the proportions of the human body, known as the Canon. The swing of the hips and slope of the shoulders animate this torso, imbuing the figure with a realistic liveliness. The sculpture is thought to represent Mercury (the Greek Hermes), the messenger of the gods, a popular subject for later adaptations of the Doryphoros type; the herald's staff was an easy substitute for the spear held by the right arm of the Polykleitan original. This lower body of a youth was cast in bronze by an artist of the Roman period. Following a trend set by statuary of the late Classical and early Hellenistic periods, the figure, seen here from the rear, was sculp-ted fully in the round and was intended to reward views from all angles. The malleability, light weight, and high tensile strength of hollow-cast bronze offered greatly expanded possibilities for the sculptural representation of the human body, in terms of both dynamic three-dimensional modeling and the suggestion of movement.

This youth stands in the contrapposto (counterbalanced) pose, his weight resting on the right leg and his left leg advanced. The slender proportions and soft modeling are characteristic of an adolescent male body, not yet fully developed.