Idealism and Naturalism Art in Ancient Greece

Idealism and Naturalism

Art in ancient Greece approached beauty through the concepts of naturalism, idealism, and a combination of the two. In the case of the diskobolos (also spelled discobolos), it is viewed as naturalistic because it accurately represents the way a human male body looks. The discus in hand indicates that diskobolos does human things, and the way in which his muscles are poised - realistically -- adds to the naturalistic theme. An argument can also be made that the sculpture is idealistic because it has a pose that is so perfect it idealizes the act of throwing a discus (and because the man's body is idealized). This paper points to the literature that identifies diskobolos as naturalism and idealism -- and a blend of both.

Diskobolos -- The Literature

It is apparent that Myron has caught the discus thrower in mid-swing; the thrower has gone as far back as he can and is poised (given the position of his feet and his left arm) to follow through and release the discus for a (hoped for) long throw. Part of the argument vis-a-vis a naturalist response to diskobolos is simply because of the precise moment that Myron has chosen to capture. In the real world of discus throwing, there is a very brief, split second pause when the arm holding the discus is as far back as it can physically go; and Myron has "…managed to capture two separate and opposite movements, as well as create a sense of potential motion in the tensed body" (Hooper, 2010). This is a reflection of the natural moment that occurs when an athlete is engaged in the discus throw.

The arms and the left food create a "neat curve down one side," Hooper explains, and that curve is broken by the "jagged edges and right angles of his back and legs on the other"; this produces artistic balance while at the same time eschews "symmetry." It was in this period of Ancient Greece that some artists and sculptors were breaking away from the "symmetry, repetition and pattern" used by earlier artists (Hooper, p. 2). Myron produced works like diskobolos in order to get away from pure symmetry and indeed more realistically portray motion -- hence, beauty is present in the naturalistic athletic simulation of action. To be sure, there is also the idealistic aspect in the diskobolos because of the nakedness portrayed and the perfect chest (which may actually be unrealistic because it appears too stiff for the movement he will need to employ).

In the book Rethinking Revolutions through Ancient Greece the authors assert that because of the "turn of the head" and the "realistically rendered body," diskobolos presents a naturalistic piece of art (Goldhill, et al., 2006) The weight and the poise of diskobolos are not necessarily evenly distributed and yet Myron has designed a "brilliant emulation of the way real bodies move and rest" (Goldhill). The authors posit that because Myron created the sculpture to stand exactly the way living humans stand, diskobolos "…denies our gaze"; in other words diskobolos is quite absorbed in his own activity and moreover, his stance implies "a context that belongs to [his] own world and not to ours as… viewers."

The work by Myron is extraordinary in terms of its "scope of realism," according to Gaius Plinius Secundus ("Pliny the Elder"), a Roman author, naturalist and military commander, who wrote Naturalis Historia, which is considered the model for all future encyclopedic works on natural and geographic phenomena. Myron's diskobolos has "more rhythms in his art than Polycleitus," Pliny asserted in his Naturalis Historia, an argument that leans more toward the side of naturalism more than idealism (University of Chicago).