Classical Figure
Idealised nude or lightly draped bodies modelled on the sculpture of ancient Greece and Rome.
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A classical figure follows the ideal set by Greek sculptors of the 5th and 4th centuries BC: balanced proportions, calm features and flesh that seems to breathe in marble or bronze. The body is young, nude or lightly draped, and untouched by age. Praxiteles's Aphrodite of Knidos (c. 350 BC), known through Roman copies, made the full female nude a subject for monumental sculpture.
Rome copied these models, and later Europe copied Rome. In 1755 Johann Joachim Winckelmann praised Greek art's ‘noble simplicity and quiet grandeur’, and Neoclassical sculptors took him at his word: Antonio Canova's Perseus with the Head of Medusa (1800–01) answers the Apollo Belvedere. Hiram Powers's The Greek Slave (1844) and Harriet Hosmer's Zenobia in Chains (1859) carried the ideal to American audiences. The type persisted in the serene nudes of Aristide Maillol and Georg Kolbe, and in physique photography that borrowed antique poses.
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Classical Mythology
