From Renaissance Florence to Hollywood in only one contrapposto step

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’.

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Julie Burchill

Will I ever pee again?

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). As Summers says, the word is not simply the past participle of the Italian word to counterpose. It is also found in Latin, contrapositum, itself derived from the Greek antithesis. The notion is fundamentally verbal, emerging from the art of rhetoric. Aristotle, in his treatise on rhetoric, says that the knack is to put together words which signify the opposite to one another, in such a way as to please, delight and inspire thought. Contrast is essentially stimulating. A classic instance is in Petrarch’s Canzioniere (ccxv): ‘E non so che nelli occhi… Po far chiara la notte, oscuro il giorno’, which might be translated ‘There is something in her eyes which illuminates night and darkens day’. Contrapposto is not the only way in which an artist can employ the antithetical principle. There is the use of sfumato, in contradistinction to the strictly linear and sharply defined, invented by Leonardo da Vinci, and the kind of chiaroscuro first employed on a princely scale by Caravaggio.