Contrapossto from Praxiteles to Rubens and Playboy

Author: * Victoria Socrates - 1 Post on this thread out of 9 Posts sitewide.
Date: Mar 28, 2006 - 20:46

A plaster cast of the 5 /12 foot marble Roman copy (the so-called "Marble Faun") in the Capitoline Museum, Rome, of Praxiteles' Resting Satyr. Photo and cast from Norwich Free Academy's Slayter Casts Collection, Norwich, Connecticut.

Peter Paul Rubens, The Union of Earth and Water

While Rubens was in Rome he must have been impressed not only by its fountains but also by its marble copy of Praxiteles' Resting Satyr, for he later merged the two in a painting of 1618, The Union of Earth and Water. Impressed by the satyr's languid pose and soft, ripe, feminine form, he turned him into a zaftig Rubinesque woman, flipped her over to lean in the opposite direction, and replaced the satyr's flute with the hand of trident-wielding Neptune - shown here in the guise of a Roman river god, with his watery essence flowing out of an overturned jar, as a Triton blows his horn and putti gambol in the water. Perhaps she is meant to be Ceres or Flora? The lion eyeing her fruits and flowers could be a clue. But also a puzzler, for it echoes the lionskin draped over Praxiteles' satyr. A more-or-less direct quote?

Note the almost perfect symmetry of the sculptural forms of the two gods, as they not only lean towards each other in a contrapuntal arrangement, but their weight is supported also by the overturned jar, whose black hole provides a focal point in the exact center of the composition - also a pivot point around which the figures appear to whirl in a sort of circle dance. Here painting imitates, and aspires to outdo, sculpture.

So it is a baroque masterpiece. We have come a long way in the art of contraposition and counter-balance since the ancient days of Polyclitos and the rather rigid rectilinear versions of his Canon, the Doryphoros or Spear Carrier. A century later Praxiteles perfected and enlivened that formula, twisting and contorting it with criss-cross balancings of the body's parts and weights, and adding his famous S-curve designs. He and his followers and imitators pushed the formula's envelope so far that not only in marble but even in bronze, struts and supports had to be invented and incorporated into the design to prevent the statues from breaking apart or toppling over.

And so the life that Praxiteles had breathed into it finally became, especially in its marble Roman copies and imitations, petrified by its own success?

A curious parallel evolution, and reaction, in which Life imitates Art, may also have been developing in the world of women's shapes in fashion, modelling and design.

Look at the current (March 20,2006) issue of The New Yorker Magazine, with its cartoon of a stick-thin model on the cover and its equally stick-thin models in the fashion ads inside. In stark contrast, check out the article in it by Joan Acocella, "The Girls Next Door," on the evolution through the decades of Hugh Hefner's Playboy centerfolds. Throughout the changes in mood and taste, the Rubenesque boobs remain constant. (There are 16 pics, to titillate the men.) Yet as in the skinny models that strut the fashion pages, their basic contrapossto formula stays the same:

"The poses, too, are often traditional. Again and again, we see the full-frontal stance with the dehanchement [dis-hipping, the swaying, unbalancing or even dis-location of the hips] - said to have been discovered by the sculptor Polyclitus in the fifth century BC - in which the body's weight is shifted onto one leg, thus creating two different, beautiful curves at the two sides of the waist."