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Establishing the canon in ancient Greece The body is essential to Classical Greek understanding of society, personhood and the self. Art--visual representation--assisted in the formulation of the ideal body and person, and operated to privilege adult male viewers, as citizens, above all others. The break up of Greek democratic principles (at their height in the mid 5th century) was accompanied by the breakdown of the ideal that we see in Polykleitus' canon in idea and practice (High Classical art; eg. The Spearbearer). This opened up possibilities in areas of depicting female power, individualism and emotion (read "lack of control") in Late Classical and Hellenistic art. Understand Greek classical art not as a sign curve of mimetic perfection (from Archaic -- early, high and late Classical -- Hellenistic), whereby art began as naive schematized forms, moving gradually to the best representation of the "real" -- a moment of ideal perfection -- and then passed into decline. Instead, pictorial interests coordinate with social, cultural and political values, working in consort with those values to create and perpetuate ideologies of power.   Parthenon, 447-422 BCE Horsemen preparing for Panathenaic procession, frieze, 1 m. Polyclitus, Spearbearer, c.440 BCE, 2.12m., original in bronze (Roman copy in marble) Praxiteles, Aphrodite of Knidos, c. 350 BCE, 2.05 m., original in marble (Roman copy) Dyplon Vases, c. 750 BCE, between 1 and 2 meters in height Artemis and Actaeon, 470 BCE, 37cm., red figure ceramic Suicide of Ajax, 540 BCE, 69 cm., black figure ceramic Kroisos (Kouros figure), c. 530 BCE, 1.94m., marble Peplos Kore, c. 530 BCE, 1.23 m., marble Kritian Boy, c. 480 BCE, 86cm., marble Riace Warrior, 460-80 BCE, 2m., bronze Discus Thrower, c450 BCE