{"id":28088,"date":"2026-08-31T05:31:05","date_gmt":"2026-08-31T05:31:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldbodybuildingnews.com\/?p=28088"},"modified":"2026-08-31T05:31:05","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T05:31:05","slug":"would-michelangelos-david-pass-a-looksmaxxing-audit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldbodybuildingnews.com\/?p=28088","title":{"rendered":"Would Michelangelo’s David pass a looksmaxxing audit?"},"content":{"rendered":"


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This article, by Dr Konstantine Panegyres from The University of Western Australia and Mr Samuel Cornell and Dr Timothy Piatkowski from The University of Queensland, was originally published in The Conversation<\/em> on Monday 31 August 2026.<\/strong><\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve ever ventured into the fitness corners of social media, you may have come across influencers peddling the ideal of a \u201cGreek god\u201d physique.<\/p>\n

They may try and sell you supplements or programs to attain said ideal \u2013 or direct you to AI apps, like UMAX AI or Physiqmax, that purport to tell you whether or not you meet the standard.<\/p>\n

Looking to ancient Greek sculptures as the paragon of fitness isn\u2019t new. In fact, bodybuilding as we know it may well have been founded on this basis.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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\u2019t recognise it.<\/p>\n

Would Sandow, and the prized marble figures he sought to imitate, pass a \u201clooksmaxxing\u201d audit today?<\/p>\n

The birth of bodybuilding<\/h3>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The most balanced is the most beautiful<\/h3>\n

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\u2013110 CE) described athletes as \u201cthe tallest and most comely men\u201d, whose \u201cbodies receive the most perfect care\u201d.<\/p>\n

These ideals were also expressed in sculpture. One famous example is the Greek sculptor Polyclitus\u2019 5th century BCE statue of the Doryphoros, or Spear-Bearer.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Greek and Roman sculptors repeatedly copied and adapted Polyclitus\u2019 figures, helping make proportion, symmetry and controlled athleticism enduring features of the Western ideal of male beauty.<\/p>\n

Two millennia later, Michelangelo\u2019s David was carved in this tradition. David is lean and long-limbed. He looks like an athletic young man \u2013 not a competitor at the modern-day Mr Olympia.<\/p>\n

When Sandow staged the world\u2019s first major physique contest at London\u2019s Royal Albert Hall in 1901, entrants were assessed on their general development, symmetry, proportion, and even skin tone. But not on their sheer size.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s discipline and self-mastery.<\/p>\n

Mass monsters<\/h3>\n

Would Sandow approve of bodybuilding today? It\u2019s hard to imagine he would. Modern bodybuilding has blasted way past his Grecian ideal.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 and even normalised.<\/p>\n

The golden-era physiques of the 1970s gave way to the \u201cmass monsters\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

The sport of bodybuilding eventually created a \u201cclassic physique\u201d division in response to these changes, illustrating an underlying nostalgia for the aesthetic it had abandoned.<\/p>\n

The manosphere\u2019s unattainable standards<\/h3>\n

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\u2019s physique unremarkable by today\u2019s standards.<\/p>\n

The physique many young men are now chasing (often at the cost of muscle dysmorphia and enhancement drug use) isn\u2019t ancient at all. It\u2019s barely a century old, and is increasingly pharmacological.<\/p>\n

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 \u201ccanthal tilt\u201d (the angle of the eyes) against bogus numerical attractiveness scales.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/div>\n


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