The main problem of Polykleitos, a Greek sculptor of the 5th century BC, is that his works have not been preserved. Nevertheless, since the second half of the 19th century, after identification in extant Roman copies of images created by him, Polykleitos has always been of interest to both scholars and artists. In many ways, this persistent interest is due to the main theme of his work that was the image of a young masculine athlete whose ideal appearance in the modern era has quickly become one of the icons of mass physical culture.
On Polykleitos in the 1930s has been focused the attention of Soviet scholars. On the one hand, art historians often gave to his works a false meaning caused by collective consciousness of the 20th century, on the other, philosophers by means of dialectical method quite far promoted in understanding of the Classical Greek art in the context of culture and mentality of the era which generated it. A remarkable example of the first approach is the book by Dmitry Nedovich “Polykleitos” (1939), which still remains the only monograph in Russian dedicated to the sculptor. Thanks to the appendix, compiled by Alexey Losev, who translated related ancient written sources into Russian, this work has not yet lost its scientific merit. The second approach found a brilliant expression in a paper about Polykleitos published in 1940 by another Soviet scholar Igor Il’in. For him, as for his friend and colleague Mikhail Lifshits, the statue of the Doryphoros (Spear-Bearer), or the “Canon”, that was the central work of Polykleitos, is not only a product of the mythological consciousness of his time, but also the wearer of the perfect inner form of a noble, in a broad sense, man, which explains the amazing vitality of this ideal image.
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4. Losev, Aleksey F. 1994. Istoriya antichnoy estetiki. Rannyaya klassika [History of Ancient Aesthetics. Early Classics]. 2nd edition, revised and expanded. Moscow: Ladomir. (In Russian).
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