Greek Body Image Essay

The image of the human body from Archaic Greece to the Renaissance to drastically changed over this time frame. For the Archaic Greece time, all the sculptures are all smiling. They also believed the perfect person was someone that was fit, handsome and intelligent. During the Greek period, their focus was getting the perfect/ideal person. For the men, they would focus on making them look strong and fit. Although they were doing this, they had also altered the body, with making the legs half the body size, which in reality, is not true. They also extend the length of the people to be eight heads high, when most human bodies are seven heads high. The women were seen as somewhat bigger during this time. With all the things they were doing, this made for body image issues to the people in
Wisdom was also key at this time. To them, wisdom was not just classified as intelligence, but also classified as the years and years of experience they had. In their work, the heads and shoulders look older, which is done by adding wrinkles to the face. Making someone look older is something that the artists only do to the men that they sculpt. When it came to showing leaders in sculptures, they would make them look young, so they can be seen as strong leader that was in charge. During the Renaissance, this is when they started using more realistic figures compared to idealizing. With the discovery of dissection of the human body, artists could start to understand the human body and the structure of it. They could learn about the muscles and body make up to make their figures look more realistic. With this, both the men and women were starting to look more muscular, which some people may not think is very realistic because not everyone is muscular like these sculptures. Another thing about this time was that some painters and sculptors only used men forms for both men and