Torso of a youth,

2nd century CE

Roman art had a profound impact on European artists working in the sixteenth century. This statue of a young man once stood in the private villa of an elite Roman in Antioch-on-the-Orontes. The youth’s pose was adapted from the Diskophoros, a fifth-century BCE statue by the renowned sculptor Polykleitos. Traces of the earlier Greek statue are especially apparent in the figure’s twisting shoulders and offset hips and in his nude body. Among ancient sculptors, Polykleitos was known for developing a canon of ratios that constituted the ideal proportions for the human form, which was widely reproduced in the Roman period. While this torso was excavated in 1933, many other surviving copies of Polykleitos’s work were well known to artists such as the Master of the Greenville Tondo, whose Saint Sebastian shares its dynamically twisting shoulders, torso, and hips.