Contrapposto is the way a statue or a painted figure stands when it puts its weight on one leg. The leg that carries the weight stays straight, and the other relaxes and bends at the knee. The hip above the straight leg rises, the shoulders tilt the other way, and the whole body takes on a slight curve from the feet to the head, the way most people stand when they wait in line.
The word is Italian and means set against, or counterpoised. Renaissance artists gave the pose that name because each part of the body answers another: one hip goes up while the other goes down, and the shoulders lean against the hips. The pose itself is much older and goes back to Greek sculptors of the fifth century BC.
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The pose looks so ordinary that it is easy to forget someone had to invent it. Nobody stands for long with the weight split evenly between both feet. And yet for more than a century, Greek sculptors carved their young men exactly that way, stiff and upright, the left leg forward and the arms down along the sides, in a stance they had borrowed from Egyptian art.
Then, shortly after 480 BC, a marble youth in Athens shifted his weight onto one leg. Within a generation another sculptor turned that shift into a rule, wrote a book about it and made a bronze statue to show it. The book and the bronze are both lost, and the statue is known only through Roman copies that had to be propped up with a tree trunk.
After antiquity the pose fell out of use for most of the Middle Ages. When it came back in Florence, it came back first through a saint in a niche, long before Michelangelo's David.
What You'll Discover
The marble boy who first shifted his weight.
Why the Spear Bearer needed a tree trunk.
How a raised hip changes the whole body.
The saint who brought the pose back.
Where contrapposto ends and the serpent begins.