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The Doryphoros (Greek Δορυφόρος, "Spear-Bearer"; Latinized as Doryphorus) is one of the best known Greek sculptures of the classical era in Western Art and an early example of Greek classical contrapposto. The lost bronze original would have been made at approximately 450-400 BCE.
The Greek sculptor Polykleitos designed a work, perhaps this one, as an example of the "canon" or "rule", showing the perfectly harmonious and balanced proportions of the human body in the sculpted form. A solid-built athlete with muscular features carries a spear balanced on his left shoulder. In the surviving Roman marble copies, a marble tree stump is added to support the weight of the marble. A characteristic of Polykleitos' Doryphoros is the classical contrapposto in the pelvis; the figure's stance is such that one leg seems to be in movement while he is standing on the other.
Some time in the 2nd century AD, Galen wrote about the Doryphoros as the perfect visual expression of the Greeks' search for harmony and beauty, which is rendered in the perfectly proportioned sculpted male nude:
Chrysippos holds beauty to consist not in the commensurability or "symmetria" [ie proportions] of the constituent elements [of the body], but in the commensurability of the parts, such as that of finger to finger, and of all the fingers to the palm and wrist, and of those to the forearm, and of the forearm to the upper arm, and in fact, of everything to everything else, just as it is written in the Canon of Polyclitus. For having taught us in that work all the proportions of the body, Polyclitus supported his treatise with a work: he made a statue according to the tenets of his treatise, and called the statue, like the work, the 'Canon.'[1]
The sculpture was known through the Roman marble replica found in Herculaneum and conserved in the Naples National Archaeological Museum, but, according to Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, early connoisseurs such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann passed it by in the royal Bourbon collection at Naples without notable comment.[2] The marble sculpture and a bronze head that had been retrieved at Herculaneum were published in Le Antichità di Ercolano, (1767)[3] but were not identified as representing Polykleitos' Doryphorus until 1863.[4]
For modern eyes, a fragmentary Doryphoros torso in basalt in the Medici collection at the Uffizi "conveys the effect of bronze, and is executed with unusual care", as Kenneth Clark noted, illustrating it in The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form:[5] "It preserves some of the urgency and concentration of the original" lost in the full-size "blockish" marble copies.
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The canonic proportions of the male torso established by Polykleitos ossified in Hellenistic and Roman times in the heroic cuirass exemplified by the Augustus of Prima Porta, who wears ceremonial dress armor modelled in relief over an idealized muscular torso which is ostensibly modelled on the Doryphoros.
In Modern Greek, the term doryphoros means "satellite"; the term φυσική δορυφόρος (physike doryphoros) is used for natural satellites, while an artificial satellite is a τεχνητός δορυφόρος (tekhnetos doryphoros).[6]