What is contrapposto? The pose that brings statues to life

Contrapposto is a pose in which a standing figure carries its weight on one leg while the other is bent and relaxed. The hip above the supporting leg is pushed up, the shoulders tilt the opposite way and the body takes on a gentle curve. The device was invented in Greek sculpture in the 5th century BC and makes a motionless body look alive, as if it could take a step at any moment.

Facts

How the pose works

Stand up and shift all your weight onto your right leg. Your right hip rises, your left knee bends slightly and your left foot rests only lightly on the floor. To keep your balance, your right shoulder drops and your left shoulder rises. The line through the hips and the line through the shoulders now tilt in opposite directions, and the spine curves. That is contrapposto: a posture built on contrasts between tension and relaxation, support and rest.

The word comes from the Italian contrapposto, roughly “set against”, and is used of figures whose body parts are twisted and angled against one another. The glossary sums it up briefly: the weight rests on one leg, so that the body curves. It sounds simple, but it was one of the great breakthroughs in the history of art, because it made it possible to show a person standing still without looking stiff.

From rigid kouroi to living bodies

The early Greek statues of young men, kouroi, stand square to the front with their arms at their sides. One foot is set forward, but the weight is spread over both legs, and the hips and shoulders are level. They look as if they were standing to attention. The Greeks had taken the stance from Egyptian sculpture, where it had been used for thousands of years.

Around 480 BC something new happened. In the so-called Kritios Boy, found on the Acropolis in Athens, one leg carries the weight and the other is slightly bent, and the head is turned a little. The statue is regarded as the earliest known example of contrapposto. Within a few decades the pose became standard in Greek sculpture, and it has never entirely disappeared since.

Polykleitos and the canon

The man who made the pose a rule was the sculptor Polykleitos of Argos. In the 5th century BC he wrote a treatise that he called the Canon, meaning “measuring rod”, and made a statue to demonstrate its rules in practice: the Spear Bearer, in Greek the Doryphoros. Both the text and the bronze original are lost, but the statue is known from Roman marble copies, the most famous of which is in Naples.

In the Spear Bearer everything is balanced crosswise. The right leg bears the weight and the right arm hangs relaxed, while the left leg rests and the left arm is bent to hold the spear. Tension and relaxation alternate diagonally through the body, so that the statue stands perfectly still yet seems able to walk on. How Polykleitos thought about proportion and the common measure of the parts is explained in the aesthetics chapter on the Greeks.

The Renaissance takes up the pose again

In the Middle Ages classical contrapposto almost entirely disappeared. Gothic figures can sway elegantly at the hip, but the sway is more an ornament than a body bearing its own weight. In the 15th century artists in Florence studied the statues of antiquity, and the pose returned. Donatello’s bronze David, usually dated to the 1440s, stands with its weight on one leg and a hand on its hip.

The best-known example is Michelangelo’s David of 1504, more than five metres tall. He stands with his weight on his right leg, while the left is set forward and relaxed. His right arm hangs down, and his left arm is bent up to the shoulder, where he holds the sling. His head is turned to the side, towards the enemy. The calm of the body and the tension in the gaze make him seem to be in the moment before the battle.

The pose also moved into painting. Botticelli’s Birth of Venus stands in contrapposto on her scallop shell, like an ancient statue, though with an impossibly long neck and sloping shoulders. Try placing David and Venus side by side and see how the same pose becomes powerful in one and floating in the other. More about the ideals of the period can be found in the guide to the Renaissance.

From Sergel to comic books

Swedish sculpture learned the bodily ideal of antiquity in Rome. Johan Tobias Sergel lived there for more than ten years and studied the ancient statues. His Faun of around 1774 is not standing but lying asleep, yet it shows the same classical ideal: a body at rest in which every part answers another. Carl Milles’s Poseidon on Götaplatsen in Gothenburg stands in a slightly twisted pose, so that he seems both to rest and to be in motion.

Contrapposto is found wherever people are meant to look natural. Models in photographs often stand with their weight on one leg, and the same rule is taught in drawing classes and used by comic-book artists and the designers of video-game characters. When a drawing of a standing person looks stiff, it is often because the weight is divided equally between both feet.

What to look for

Start with the feet: which leg stands straight under the body, and which is bent or set forward? Then follow the hips and shoulders. If the lines through them tilt in opposite directions, the figure is in contrapposto. Look at the arms last. In Polykleitos and his followers the arm on the side of the supporting leg is often relaxed, so that tension and relaxation form a cross through the body.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Which statue is usually regarded as the earliest known example of contrapposto?