When in New York last week I swung by the Metropolitan Museum of Art--you know, for a spot of culture.  They've got themselves a pretty cool sculpture garden that includes this piece, a sculpture of Adam by Rodin, modeled after Michelangelo's painting of Adam at the Sistine Chapel:

As you can see, Adam was pretty buff, even from the moment of his creation, and he didn't even have to hit the gym or pound protein shakes for it.  Eating that apple was pretty rough on our genetic pool, it would seem.  True, the arms aren't as huge as Ronnie Coleman's, and he'd probably get docked for his chest, and possibly for his thighs, but you can't argue with his conditioning: the dude is ripped.

One particularly striking element of this sculpture is Adam's ankles:  they're huge.  The reason for this mild case of the "cankles," I realized, was that bronze is, you know, heavy.  You can't support a massive slab of bronze on a couple of delicate little twigs; so the ankles--the smallest part of the support base for such a sculpture--have got to be pretty enormous.

But Rodin, who clearly was no slouch in the aesthetics-and-proportions department, couldn't just make the ankles huge; he had to then beef up everything else to match them or his sculpture would be disproportionate and he'd forever go down in history as The Sculptor Who Loved Cankles.  

Hence, an Adam that roughly resembles an NFL running back. 

Now, I'm not saying that the whole reason Rodin sculpted this guy to look like this was that bronze weighed so much per square inch--but it's something to consider.  Given that he probably never in his life saw anyone who was built even remotely like the guy he sculpted, and that bodybuilding and steroids and Marky Mark were still over a century off, why else would he have sculpted him to look like this?

It's well-known that bodybuilders of the '50's and before speak of being influenced by classical statuary; could it be that their descendants have been chasing an ideal that sprung, indirectly, from the particular demands of sculpting in bronze?