Masculinity

About Masculinity

Ideals of manhood have been carved and cast for millennia. Polykleitos's Doryphoros (c. 440 BC), known through Roman copies, set out a canon of proportion for the male athlete. Michelangelo's David (1501–04) turned that body into an emblem of civic resolve, and Jacques-Louis David's Oath of the Horatii (1784) expressed masculine duty through locked legs and outstretched arms.

Later artists have tested these models rather than simply repeating them. Catherine Opie's photographic series Being and Having (1991) shows friends in false moustaches, presenting manhood as something worn. Kehinde Wiley's Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps (2005) places a young Black man in a conqueror's pose, and the South African painter Cinga Samson portrays groups of young men with a watchful stillness. Look for stance, uniforms and the tools of strength, and for the moments where toughness gives way to tenderness or doubt.