the Canon the beauty or perfection of a human figure arises not in the of its commensurability or symmetria constituent elements but in the commensurability of the parts such as that of finger to finger, and of all fingers to the palm and wrist, and of these to the forearm, and of the fact forearm to the upper arm, and, in of everything to everything else. To display these relationships a statue was necessarily nude, and in fifth Greece, male. It could also have cosmic significance, man the measure of all things in the often quoted words of the Stoic philosopher Protagoras 48o-410). Polyclitus declared (c, B perfection arises from the minute that' calculation of many numbers' which suggests the influence of sixth-century BG Pythagorean philosophers who developed a theory of cosmic propor tions derived from the discovery of the relationship between the measurable lengths of the chords of a lyre and audible harmony.The idealized statues modelled and carved in ancient Greece, much copied in the Roman empire and rediscovered in fifteenth-century Italy, became part of the western artistic canon -to use the word in a different sense, derived from the canonical books of the Bible and now adopted for an accepted body of supposedly major works art and literature. They also established a criterion of human beauty that has insidiously conditioned the attitudes of Europeans to themselves and to others, encouraging belief in the eternal law that first in beauty should be first in Hyperion might, as John Keats put it in (1818)