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match the mysteries of *#tlzqm3 classical beauty. Was his statue shaped to conforn to the principles of his treatise or was his treatise written about the women nike air max 95 statue' We cannot know. But belief in his rules for making a beautiful statu* persisted. Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23-79), the versatile Roman encyclopedist four centuries after Polyclitus still credited him with "perfecting" the sci ence of sculpture in metal, just as Phidias "had opened up its possibilities.'"Polyclitus . . . made a statue which artists call the 'Canon' and from whicl they derive the basic forms of their art, as if from some kind of law.' Polyclitus's often repeated axiom was that "perfection arises through man) numbers." Even if a sculptor deviated only slightly in each of his measures. he warned, in the end these could add up to a large error. The canon, too, could protect the sculptor from the fickle public taste. A cautionary tale, still repeated seven centuries after Polyclitus's death, explained:Polyclitus made two statues at the same time, one which would be pleasing to the crowd and the other according to the principles of his art. In accordance with the opinion of each person who came into his workshop, he altered something and changed its form, submitting to the advice of each. Then he put both statues on display. The one was marvelled at by everyone, and the other was laughed at. Thereupon Polyclitus said, "But the one which you find fault with, you made yourselves; while the one which you marvel at, I made."The unmistakable Greek classic style may be a product of its mathemati- cally prescribed proportions.The ancient Greeks had long associated measure with beauty. "Measure and commensurability," wrote Plato in the Philebus, "are everywhere iden tifiable with beauty and nike air max 2011 shoes excellence." This notion, the heart of Polyclitus's canon, Aristotle himself traced back to Pythagoras's discovery that "the qualities of numbers exist in a musical scale [harmonia ], in the heavens, and in many other things." If the sounds of an octave could be expressed in harmonious proportions, why not also the harmony of the whole universe? The surviving fragments of nike air max shoes 2012 Polyclitus's treatise, finding sculptural beauty in numbers, add his bit to the Pythagorean nike air max shoes 2012 tradition. When Vitruvius, centuries later, expounded his own famous system of proportions, we have seen that his symmetria for the architectural orders plainly drew on a sculptural canon. That Polyclitus probably worked by his own canon we know from re- peated complaints that his statues were too much alike, "almost all com- posed after the same pattern." Lysippus (flourished 328 B.C.), the greatest sculptor of the Age of Alexander the Great, became famous for his slender- ized variations from Polyclitus's canon. A native of Sikyon, near Poly-