The other day I came across a clever book on the movie actor John Wayne. I forget the name of the author but it may have been Simon Louvish, who writes better than anyone else on the film-star world. This suggested that the secret of Wayne’s immense physical appeal was his instinctive contrapposto. When filmed standing he never held himself stiffly to attention, as Laurence Olivier and Clark Gable tended to do, but shifted his weight casually on to one leg. This is the posture adopted by both Donatello and Michelangelo in their splendid, and splendidly different, renderings of ‘David’.
The concept of contrapposto is subtle as well as important, and goes right to the heart of aesthetics. If you want to go into it seriously, you must read the work of David Summers, especially his incisive article ‘Contrapposto: Style and Meaning in Renaissance Art’, in the Art Bulletin (1977).
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