How Ancient Greek Statues define beauty standards

Ancient Greeks created new muscles!?

Why weren’t the Greeks satisfied with a perfect replica of the human body? It took centuries to achieve acute realism when creating statues that depict the male sex, but once that goal was achieved, the Greeks were still not happy. The first reason is the human psychology of the constant need for exaggeration. Modern beauty standards are a great example of this. People this day and age want bigger lips, brighter eyes, and wider hips. Once they achieve that, they want to enhance themselves even more. Nowadays, we have chemicals and plastic surgery, but in Ancient Greece, physical form was evidence of physical ability.

Another reason Greeks made statue’s physique so unachievable was because typically, their statues depicted their gods. They saw the gods as superior in every way which also included physical ability. Different from the neolithic era where obesity was seen as appealing because it meant you were well fed, in ancient Greece, the lean muscular build was desirable because it meant you were physically capable and efficient in the battle arena. Gods would be the most strong and powerful and therefore needed to be built to look stronger than any man.

So how can you make a human-like statue look stronger than any man? You add muscles that don’t exist!

Greek artists started creating statues with defined muscles that don’t exist. On this particular statue, two extra muscles were added to the lower back to make it look even more muscular than will ever be achievable. The unfortunate reality of this is that most Greeks physical goal was to look as close to a god as possible. They were making their own goal unachievable as the never-ending cycle of unreachable beauty standards continues.

This topic interests me because I have always found the human-depicting statues of ancient Greece to be the most beautiful and breath taking throughout history. This prompted my curiosity for the reason behind why I, and many others are so enthralled with these pieces of art. The reason being that they are not just depicting a human, but a superior version of a human, one that our brain chemicals find more desirable than reality.