Would Michelangelo’s David pass a looksmaxxing audit?

If you’ve ever ventured into the fitness corners of social media, you may have come across influencers peddling the ideal of a “Greek god” physique.

They may try and sell you supplements or programs to attain said ideal – or direct you to AI apps, like UMAX AI or Physiqmax, that purport to tell you whether or not you meet the standard.

Looking to ancient Greek sculptures as the paragon of fitness isn’t new. In fact, bodybuilding as we know it may well have been founded on this basis.

It’s ironic, then, that this pursuit has drifted so far from its original aspirations that even Eugen Sandow, the so-called father of modern bodybuilding, wouldn’t recognise it.

Would Sandow, and the prized marble figures sought to imitate, pass a “looksmaxxing” audit today?

The birth of bodybuilding

Strongman Eugen Sandow was born in Prussia (modern-day Kaliningrad, Russia) in 1867. While on a trip to Italy as a boy, he gazed at classical statues in Rome and decided to build his body to match.

He was also known to dust himself in white powder to mimic marble when he posed, thereby recreating himself as a classical sculpture on stage. Through emulating Grecian statues, he signalled an ancient ideal.

The most balanced is the most beautiful

The Greeks and Romans did admire physical beauty. For men, this usually meant an athletic physique, an attractive face and tall stature. For example, the Greek orator Dio Chrysostom (circa 40–110 CE) described athletes as “the tallest and most comely men”, whose “bodies receive the most perfect care”.

These ideals were also expressed in sculpture. One famous example is the Greek sculptor Polyclitus’ 5th century BCE statue of the Doryphoros, or Spear-Bearer.

This figure is muscular but not enormous: broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted and carefully proportioned. Its beauty comes from the balance between strength and restraint, tension and relaxation.

Polyclitus believed beauty could be created through correct proportions. In his lost treatise, the Canon, he argued the parts of the body should stand in harmonious relationship to one another, using mathematical proportions.

Greek and Roman sculptors repeatedly copied and adapted Polyclitus’ figures, helping make proportion, symmetry and controlled athleticism enduring features of the Western ideal of male beauty.

Two millennia later, Michelangelo’s David was carved in this tradition. David is lean and long-limbed. He looks like an athletic young man – not a competitor at the modern-day Mr Olympia.

When Sandow staged the world’s first major physique contest at London’s Royal Albert Hall in 1901, entrants were assessed on their general development, symmetry, proportion, and even skin tone. But not on their sheer size.

Sandow also preached the importance of a physical culture available to any man. He espoused physical improvement in the Greek gymnasium tradition, with the body as evidence of one’s discipline and self-mastery.

Mass monsters

Would Sandow approve of bodybuilding today? It’s hard to imagine he would. Modern bodybuilding has blasted way past his Grecian ideal.

Throughout the mid-20th century, bodybuilding champions such as Steve Reeves continued to embody the classic look. Reeves inspired Arnold Schwarzenegger, and played the role of Hercules in the eponymous 1958 film.

Ideals of size and mass began to change in the 1930s with the arrival of synthetic testosterone, and in the 1950s with the rise of anabolic steroids in competitive use. These chemical developments remodelled what bodybuilding looked like as they became more widespread and accessible – and even normalised.

The golden-era physiques of the 1970s gave way to the “mass monsters” of the 1990s, fuelled by the addition of peptides such as human growth hormone and insulin. Competitors walked on stage at sizes no unassisted human could realistically reach.

The sport of bodybuilding eventually created a “classic physique” division in response to these changes, illustrating an underlying nostalgia for the aesthetic it had abandoned.

The manosphere’s unattainable standards

The final irony is cast in bronze: today, the Mr Olympia trophy is a statuette of Sandow himself. It is awarded to men whose bodies Sandow might not have recognised as the ideal at all, and who would perhaps consider Sandow’s physique unremarkable by today’s standards.

The physique many young men are now chasing (often at the cost of muscle dysmorphia and enhancement drug use) isn’t ancient at all. It’s barely a century old, and is increasingly pharmacological.

This same impulse is also leading young men to seek perfection in other areas, such as the face, with online looksmaxxing communities rating features like jaw shape, facial symmetry and “canthal tilt” (the angle of the eyes) against bogus numerical attractiveness scales.

Those wishing to pursue these modern notions of supposedly ancient ideals should remember the Greeks had a word for mere mortals who forgot their limits and tried to emulate the gods: hubris.

Timothy Piatkowski receives funding from National Health and Medical Research Council.

Konstantine Panegyres and Samuel Cornell do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.