Proportion in art is the relationship in size between the parts of a work: a head to its body, a figure to the doorway behind it, each part to the whole. It is easiest to see in the Doryphoros, a Greek bronze of a spear bearer made around 440 BC by the sculptor Polykleitos and known today through Roman marble copies, a statue designed to be a rule.
Polykleitos wrote a book to go with it, and the book and the statue were both called the Canon. The book told sculptors how each part of the body should answer to every other. Its idea survives in a single sentence reported by the Roman physician Galen: beauty consists in the proportions, not of the elements, but of the parts.
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The trouble is that nobody can check the rule. The book is lost, and so is the bronze, which was melted down long ago for its metal. The statue pictured above is a Roman copy in marble, and the Canon exists today only as that copy and a sentence repeated by a physician who wrote long after Polykleitos was dead.
That makes every claim about what the Greeks measured a reconstruction. The famous rules that came after fare no better. Leonardo's drawing of the ideal man does not follow the Roman text it is named after, and the golden ratio said to hide in famous paintings was found there by writers who came centuries later.
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