Quick! Grab a stopwatch. Find an art historian. Ask them about Renaissance sculpture.
Start time.
Within the first ten seconds, they will have mentioned this word: contrapposto.
What is contrapposto and why is it important?
There are many aspects to the evolution of art, and one of the most discussed is the pose of human figures. Art historians like to focus on the 3D world of sculpture, but of course the same principles apply to painting and drawing. To understand the importance of the contrapposto pose, we must first look at what came before.
Exemplary for the Archaic period is the Greek kouros-type, which was in many ways similar to Egyptian statues.
The poses are formulaic and stiff. The figures exist almost entirely in the same plane, with only the forward stride breaking the line. Both legs are stiff, with the weight apparently resting equally on both, and the arms are stretched along the body. This style matches the use and intentions of these sculptures; they were not meant to depict naturalistic scenes. Kouros sculptures were often used like tombstones, marking the grave of the deceased. They were supposed to have this transcendent, timeless property, like eternal guardians.
This changed when the Greeks introduced contrapposto, which the Britannica defines as follows:
Contrapposto, (Italian: “opposite”), in the visual arts, a sculptural scheme, originated by the ancient Greeks, in which the standing human figure is poised such that the weight rests on one leg (called the engaged leg), freeing the other leg, which is bent at the knee. With the weight shift, the hips, shoulders, and head tilt, suggesting relaxation with the subtle internal organic movement that denotes life. Contrapposto may be used for draped as well as nude figures. The Greeks invented this formula in the early 5th century BC as an alternative to the stiffly static pose—in which the weight is distributed equally on both legs—that had dominated Greek figure sculpture in earlier periods.
There are countless examples, like the famous Hermes and the infant Dionysus, traditionally attributed to Praxiteles and dated to the 4th century BCE.
One leg is straight, the knee locked, supporting the weight. The other leg is free, allowing it to bend at the knee, as if the figure might take a step at any moment. This is a very natural pose, and people actually stand like this. When you stand up for a while, like when taking a shower or standing in line, you will automatically lock the knee in one leg, allowing the other leg to rest, and switch supporting legs once in a while. It is as if we observe the figure in an everyday, casual moment (even though the body and face are still idealized). Typically, the hips are tilted, relaxing on the side of the bent leg. This causes the typical S-curve in the body when observed from the front or back.
In the Middle Ages, artists’ interest shifted again. Some overviews of art history will say that contrapposto was “forgotten”, but this is probably not the best way to describe what happened. In Europe, art was generally supposed to support a Greater Purpose, tell a story, teach a lesson, and the goal was no longer to capture the natural beauty of the idealized human body. Nobody cares about St Cuthbert’s musculature while he discovers a piece of timber.
The statues at the Western (Royal) Portal at Chartres Cathedral (ca. 1145) are an important example of a return to a more symbolic form; the figures are stiff, vertically elongated, appear to rise from the ground, and complement the architecture for which they are designed.
Finally, the Renaissance saw a renewed interest in lifelike representations of the human body, and love for the contrapposto pose. An early example is Donatello’s bronze David (1440’s).
Why am I writing about contrapposto?
In earlier blog posts, I noticed something strange about the poses of the human figures in the Voynich manuscript (traditionally called “nymphs”). The overwhelming majority of nymphs who are standing up, support their weight on one leg, resulting in a variety of contrapposto-like poses. Since the majority of the over 500 figures are standing, we are talking of hundreds of figures in (pseudo?) contrapposto in a, early 15th century manuscript.
Now, in medieval manuscripts, especially those with one or more unclothed figures, you will also encounter contrapposto. But this pose – if it occurs at all – is generally only part of the repertoire and nowhere near as prominent as in the VM. Consider these examples from two copies of the Balneis Puteolanis, one from Cod. Bodmer 135 (second half of the 14th century) and one from Morgan MS G.74 (ca. 1400).
In the older MS (top), leg poses are all over the place. Some figures awkwardly bend both legs, others stretch both legs like stilts. However, in the Morgan MS (bottom), bathers assume a more natural pose that looks like it may be inspired by classical nudes. I added a nymph whose pose closely resembles that of the leftmost bather. It was only after I added this image here that I learned that the Morgan Balneis was finished by a later artist (late 15th century?) and this is one of his additions. The renaissance influence is clear.
In short, if you look through medieval manuscripts, you will certainly encounter examples of contrapposto. These will, however, almost certainly be surrounded by figures in stiff or less natural poses. Why does the VM rely so heavily on something resembling the Classical and Renaissance favorite? Is it a coincidence? Does the pose indicate something else?
Rather than defend one solution, I will present a number of arguments pro and con-trapposto. Let’s start with the counterarguments.
Con: maybe they are just walking
Part of the appeal of contrapposto is its dynamic potential: because the weight rests on one leg, the other leg looks like it is moving or may start moving at any moment. Therefore, it is possible that the VM artist(s) created a bunch of figures in “accidental contrapposto”, aiming for a walking pose without being inspired by classical or renaissance examples. This certainly appears to be the case in the Zodiac roundels, where the nymphs look like they are ever marching on, just like the stars they hold keep turning in their apparent orbit around the world.
Here, thematically and intuitively (though intuition may be wrong) I guess one would see the nymphs as walking rather than posing in the way of the Greco-Roman nude. However, this hypothesis is harder to maintain in Q13, where nymphs are standing in pools, in “buckets”, on pedestals, facing each other and holding hands, still while resting their weight on one leg.
Even if the figures around the Zodiac emblems are intended to be walking (which is not unlikely) then still it is remarkable that they do so in a contrapposto-like pose. In medieval imagery, it is more common for figures to walk with both legs similarly, not with one straight supporting leg like in the VM. Some poses are typical for the late Medieval period; for example, it is common to see a figure “striding” with both legs stretched and the weight apparently supported equally on both.
A different pose is common in the richly illuminated MS The Hague, MMW, 10 A 11, which was made in Paris, 1457, presumably later and with more prestigious ambitions than the VM. The following image is a favorite with Voynich researchers because of certain resemblances to the Zodiac section. Notice how these figures tend to rest their weight either on both legs or on the bent leg, in some kind of reverse contrapposto. Walking or standing like this is unnatural and tiring, yet the pose should look familiar to those used to medieval imagery.
And in this round dance from the same MS, both legs of the figures are engaged, emphasizing the dynamics of the scene. This is different in the VM, where the leg closest to the viewer is more consistently positioned like a pillar under the body.
Still, it is entirely possible that the Zodiac section’s nymphs are meant to portray a cycle like this, ever going round and round, and just do so in a stance that resembles contrapposto.
Con: strange anatomy
There is a discrepancy between the VM’s apparent love for the pose of the idealized Classical nude on the one hand, and its general mistreatment of human anatomy on the other. Those artists who understand the virtues of contrapposto, whether ancient Greeks or Renaissance Italians, generally also strive to depict the ideal human body. Greek artists like Polykleitos introduced methods for calculating the desired measurements for each part of the body in relation to the rest.
Moreover, contrapposto is ideal for displaying one’s understanding of the mechanics of the human body. The asymmetrical position of the legs influences everything else: the hips tilt one way, the shoulders another, the torso is compressed on one side and stretched on the other. Using contrapposto generally goes hand in hand with a desire to show off the beauty of the human body and the artist’s understanding of it.
Not so in the Voynich manuscript. Let’s start with proportions; The nymphs are on average 4 heads tall, while the average human is 7.5 heads tall. In idealizing art forms, this ratio can increase to 8 or 9 heads. The combination of Western art history’s most praised pose and stunted proportions is strange.
The proportions issue is not only limited to the head/body ratio. For example, this guy’s arm is so long he could easily touch his ankles without bending over.
Additionally, the VM sometimes displays a remarkable view on the way various parts of the body connect to each other. Consider the nymph on the right, who stands in a beautiful contrapposto, but whose far arm connects to the torso much lower than the near arm does. Nymph on the right for comparison.
And what about examples like the one below? The position of the legs is fine, but try doing what she does with her arms and you will need medical care (don’t try it).
Is it just that they chose one method of drawing the legs (for hundreds of figures) and just varied the arms, including implausible feats of flexibility?
Pro: more than just the legs
There is something about the arms as well, with some poses being much more popular than others. Many nymphs “hook” one arm, usually the one closest to the viewer. The far arm can appear in a wider range of positions. Here are a few examples, look at the arm that is closest to you.
Creating angles by placing a hand on the hip or holding a loose garment is, again, a favorite in Classical and Renaissance art (though certainly not as ubiquitous as contrapposto). It makes the pose more relaxed, natural and confident, and is overall more pleasing – just ask fashion models.
It may even be that part of the nymphs’ curves are intended to represent contrapposto’s famous s-curve in the VM’s awkward three-quarters perspective. See Pisanello’s study of a man for example; the hips jut out to the side of the supporting leg, where the torso is compressed. The torso bends towards the side of the free leg.
Statues?
In a thread on the Voynich.ninja forum, Davidsch linked to an interesting page about nudes in medieval art. It includes the story of Joel ben Simeon, a Jewish scribe who moved from Germany to Italy. In 1455, he depicted this naked woman in the Murphy Haggadah. The author suggests that Joel may have seen a Greco-Roman statue of Venus, or a drawing of one, and took it as the basis for this woman. This connection explains why she is standing on a pedestal, in a pose very reminiscent of the classical Venus. And Voynich nymphs.
On the other side of the Alps, around the same time, the aforementioned MS The Hague MMW, 10 A 11 was made. This also included a large number of “Greco-Roman” nudes on pedestals, but the poses are medieval.
As you may know, Q13 also includes a number of nudes on architectural pedestals. Their poses bring to mind classical sculpture and shoulder pain.
Of course this only applies to a relatively small number of nymphs (not those in the Zodiac section and Q13b) and the “bases” tend to hold a top filled with water.
What does it mean?
I don’t know, but I needed to write about this to get it off my mind. To me, it feels like someone told the VM artist(s) some basic rules about Classical art and then ran away. They then applied these rules overly consistently, messing up every other aspect of human anatomy. Is it the examples they used? The teachers they had? The message they wanted to express? Or all just a coincidence? In the context of Renaissance art, the VM’s carbon dating is relatively early (1404–1438), so the answer to these questions may be relevant, but I don’t have them. Anyone know a good art historian?
The Voynich Temple 
Most probably the Voynich Artist is just using an overly stylized approach: he learned how to draw nude females with a three quarter view (probably a pose he copied) and that is all he uses. Even when it makes little sense, but, hey, a three quarter view of a nude woman is better than nothing.
As for the contrapposto, it is not just about the legs: the arms must follow the same scheme too. In a real contrapposto , the relaxed arm is opposite to the relaxed leg and vice versa. Hermes is holding baby Dionysus with the arm which is opposite to the leg which is sustaining his body, while the other arm was probably relaxed like its opposing leg. The same happens with the Athena and the Pisanello’s sketch. The David by Donatello is not a good example, because it is far less idealized and it is not strictly following the contrapposto scheme: in fact, it is thought that he used a live model for the complex pose. There is an older version of this statue, which is more traditional. The figures in the Voynich are not strictly following the contrapposto, because their arms are all over the place.
On top of that, one should note the head pose of the Voynich figures. In classical and renaissance art (and so on, after Renassaince), there is another common rule: the face and the chest of a figure must not be orientated the same way. The Egyptian statue, the archaic Greek statue and the Voynich figures have their faces facing the same direction as their breast. Their torsos and necks look stiff. Athena, Hermes, David have their heads tilted and look much more natural and relaxed. This is another significant point, because there are many medieval examples of figures not so stiff as the Voynich ones.
Another point: the statues from the Chartres Cathedral are not good examples in this context, because they are architectural elements, not free standing statues and so they are stiff. If you want to look at some good examples of late medieval (XIII century) statuary, look for Andrea Pisano and Giovanni Pisano. There are others, of course, but those two are the first I can think of.
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Well, I meant Nicola Pisano, not Andrea, who is later (early XIV century). However I just realized that Andrea Pisano and his son Nino are good examples too: they are contemporary to the alleged date of the VM.
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The thing with the VM figures’ arms is though, that the “angled” arm, that is the one that hangs behind the body or rests on the hip, is in the vast majority of cases the one closest to the viewer, that is the one on the side of the supporting leg. The other arm is indeed all over the place, but this seems like a less crucial part of contrapposto. In the majority of cases, the relaxed arm is on the side of the engaged leg.
So my question is: if the VM artist in something like the 1420’s either received instructions or used an example for this pose, then what does that tell us about his environment? Something like this is certainly more likely to happen in Tuscany (or Italy by extension) than in many other places.
The Pisanos’ sculptures are wonderful, I did not know about them. I don’t think it is necessary for me to look up in which region they were active 🙂
You are right about the cathedral statues, I simply looked for an extreme art form that was in between the “contrapposto-loving” eras. To illustrate the “floating” verticality of Gothic figures, I should have better referred to manuscript art, like this one http://news.getty.edu/content/1208/images/gothic_.jpg
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Well, I just realized that the VM is dated to the early XV century, while in my head it was floating a late XIV date. Well, whatever. At that point in time, that is early XV century, there were surely a lot of good examples of somewhat-classical-looking art in Europe. The VA author certainly had a lot of available sources to copy. The fact is, his art does not look particularly renaissance to me: too stiff, too formulaic, too abstract. If he was exposed to early Renaissance or to some late medieval classicist revival, he did not understand that and just copied what he saw without much thought process, at least from a visual perspective.
The VM art does look European to me, it always did to me, and I already listed a number of reasons in an older comment. However I think that the VA was more a copier than a producer: the VA took what was available at the time to fulfil his strange project. As a consequence, I still prefer a Central European origin for this work, at most Southern France instead of Northern or some Alpine region, especially considering its early XV century date.
As for the Gothic figures, I suspect that those Chartres statues are so tall for a perspective trick: since they were positioned in a high place, the artist made them more elongated so that the viewer from below could still see them nicely and not compressed by the skewed angle of his point of view. That is just the kind of (visual) artistic subtlety that I cannot spot in the VM.
This is XIII century art from Germany:
As we can see, there is a good number of bent arms.
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Koen,
I’m glad you’ve brought this point again to the fore.
As you know, I’ve been saying since about 2012 that the origin of the ‘ladies’ images is Greek and from the early centuries AD, distorted during subsequent transmission because preserved in an environment where literal depiction of living things was culturally unacceptable, as was replication, and that what occurred – before 1430 in my opinion – is that various works from that community entered the Latins’ horizons, our present volume being composed of extracts from one or more of those works (doubtless valued for their antiquity), with certain additions made and a few western (Latins’) habits intruding here and there, sometimes accidentally as with certain too-straight lines in the bathy- section, or deliberately as with the central emblems inserted to fill the centres in the month-folios.
But no matter that your preferred argument is that the ”ladies’ display a classicising rather than a classical character, I think the missing link here is discussion of the history of such classicising in Latins’ imagery and, most importantly, when we find it includes not only the contrapposto pose but also acceptance of the female figure as ‘curvaceous’ and the limbs – especially the lower limbs – as no longer elongated in the way they were in Latin art throughout the medieval centuries and are sill in Latins’ manuscript art to as late as the mid-fifteenth century in French and in German and ‘central European’ works, including those you’ve cited above.
In fact, we’ve had the answer to that second matter since Panofsky commented on the manuscript.
If one accepts the radiocarbon dating, and really knows the history of western art, then to posit a Latin origin for the images in the Vms becomes simply impossible – the dates don’t work.
But I will certainly cite your work which is the first ever to discuss this important point about the classical contrapposto. Together with your ‘lobster’ posts, it entitles you -imo – to be credited as one of the few who conducted original research and made solid, objective contributions to our understanding this manuscript. Congratulations.
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If I understand you correctly, you are postulating that the VM is a Western European medieval tradition of one or more late antiquity codices from the Eastern Mediterranean (Greek) area? Is that correct?
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sorry – typo – for ‘1430’ read ‘1340’
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Stefano.
I adhere to the conservative method – I do not postulate anything. I am positively opposed to the practice of forming fictional narratives (mis-called ‘theories’) and then seeking only to persuade others to believe.
Instead, I isolate a particular problem, whether of the primary material or of some inherited notion (such as that the month-folios are ‘astrological’) and then research that question through historical, iconographic, primary and secondary scholarly evidence.
Any opion I form is therefore an end-result of enquiry and not a precursor to research.
In this case – given that I was asked to consider this manuscript because of my area of academic specialisation – I had the good fortune to come equipped with the background and the particular technical angle to treat with the images and what they had to tell us about the origin and nature of the VMS images. I have no firm opinion about the written text, except the obvious, negative ones such as that the hand is not central European, and (imo) probably not renaissance Italian either, since the Vms is dated to before Bracciolini made that style of writing popular.
In explaining the images to online Voynich writers, the greatest difficulty has been to get across the fact that I do prefer conventional method .. that is, working from observation, to asking specific research questions, and then researching to discover answers to those questions before venturing any opinion at all. I consider a ‘theory’ only worth the name if it is an explanation embracing every known datum about the manuscript including codicology, palaeography, imagery and text-meaning.. so I have no theory, only the conclusions of research to offer.
My opinion – if you want it – is that the origin for much of the matter in the Vms (if you take the imagery as indicative) is Hellenistic in origin; that for much of its existence that material had been preserved outside the horizon of western Christian (i.e.. ‘Latin’) Europe, that it came into the Latins’ horizons around the 1340s, and that our present volume is a compilation from such materials.
I am inclined to believe from a large number of individual details in the manuscript that the most probable group to have brought the matter into the Latins’ purview was the Jewish-Genoese association which was basically one to do with mutual trade across the East-West border as it existed after the fall of the last crusader state in the eastern Mediterranean. I think this because, at the relevant time, there were specific political and other constraints on most European lines of trade with the east.
That environment also allows the possibility that the written part of the text is not in a European language but (as some have recently argued) a Turkic language, or even ‘Turkish’ as such. But other languages would also apply, such as one which is said, specifically, to have become the lingua franca across most of the eastern roads during the Pax Mongolica.
I do not for a moment believe that the material in the Vms (if one assumes the imagery and text closely connected) was first enunciated in mainland Europe, though I suppose one might argue for north Africa, some of the Balearic Islands, or even at a stretch southern Italy, in all of which some Hellenistic cultural centres had been established.
The picture becomes a little more complex, because copyists make changes, both witting and unwitting, and the same details which provide evidence of the transmission into Latin horizons also constitute what may be termed a different ‘chronological stratum’ – of which I identified four major ones.
So much that is still repeated as if it were undeniable fact about this manuscript owes its origin only to the imaginations of Wilfrid Voynich and Professor Newbold. More owes its persistence to the fact that while people tackling the written part of this text are expected to have studied at least *something* of cryptanalysis and linguistics, the approach to the imagery is astoundingly casual and one simply cannot get most Voynicheros to understand that training and methodological rigor .. not to mention research and balance-of-evidence has to apply to the imagery as well.
As usual, I have delivered a short talk instead of writing a comment. As usual, I apologise for that, but your question deserved better than a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ – either of which would have been less than the truth.
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Thanks for your exhaustive answer. I think that now I have a better grasp of your opinion. That said, I suppose that my technical background forces me to a different epistemological approach to the study of the VM and to learning in general.
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Stefano – I’ve just noticed your reply o Jan 10th. I don’t think that knowing a person’s opinion is always as helpful as knowing something about the quality of their evidence, but it’s nice of you to take the time to read even that precis. I agree that having a formal study in a relevant area, backed up by contextual studies and (preferably) some years experience in a field is a distinct advantage in forming an opinion on any technical issue, including opinions about images in a 600 yr old manuscript.
There are so many discrete areas of specialisation relevant to study of manuscripts – may I ask which it that you have technical training?
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Diane – I am an engineer specialised in Systems theory, particularly in estimation and identification of systems, with a good basis in Measure theory.
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‘… in which is is that…
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