The Development of Hindu Iconography c15.2.3

c15.2.3

In Greek days there were many artists who formulated such canons of proportions. I have already stated that there were different schools of sculptors in ancient Hellas such as Old Attic, Old Argive, Polyclitan, Argive, Sicyonian or Lysippan, *etc.*, which were distinguished from one another on the basis of the fixed proportions of the parts of the human figure. These proportions were written down by subsequent artists and art-historians for the help and guidance of later sculptors and painters. E. A. Gardner tells us that ‘*theoretical* works upon the principles of sculpture were written by several of the most distinguished artists of antiquity; but none of these have been preserved to us. . . . Later compilers have recorded many opinions or statements, often without acknowledgement which we can trace with more or less certainty to these lost treatises.¹ Polyclitus, who flourished in the 5th century B.C. and was most probably a pupil of Ageladas of Argos, was one of the first to write such a work dealing with the proportions of the body; he embodied these rules in a sculpture named as the ‘Doryphorus’ (the treatise as well as the sculpture was described in the Greek works on art as the *Canon*). Euphranor, the Corinthian, who flourished in the fourth century B.C. and who was both a sculptor and a painter, also wrote upon colouring and proportion;