Ancient Greek art

It used a vocabulary of ornament that was shared with pottery, metalwork and other media, and had an enormous influence on Eurasian art, especially after Buddhism carried it beyond the expanded Greek world created by Alexander the Great.

[3] By convention, finely painted vessels of all shapes are called "vases", and there are over 100,000 significantly complete surviving pieces,[5] giving (with the inscriptions that many carry) unparalleled insights into many aspects of Greek life.

[15] The Geometric phase was followed by an Orientalizing period in the late 8th century, when a few animals, many either mythical or not native to Greece (like the sphinx and lion respectively) were adapted from the Near East, accompanied by decorative motifs, such as the lotus and palmette.

[18] By about 320 BC fine figurative vase-painting had ceased in Athens and other Greek centres, with the polychromatic Kerch style a final flourish; it was probably replaced by metalwork for most of its functions.

[20] Fine metalwork was an important art in ancient Greece, but later production is very poorly represented by survivals, most of which come from the edges of the Greek world or beyond, from as far as France or Russia.

[24] Armour and "shield-bands" are two of the contexts for strips of Archaic low relief scenes, which were also attached to various objects in wood; the band on the Vix Krater is a large example.

[41] Unlike authors, those who practiced the visual arts, including sculpture, initially had a low social status in ancient Greece, though increasingly leading sculptors might become famous and rather wealthy, and often signed their work (often on the plinth, which typically became separated from the statue itself).

[48][49] It is generally agreed that "Egyptian statuary of the 2nd millennium BC gave the decisive impulse for the innovation of Greek sculpture in life-size and in hyper formats in the Archaic Period during the late 7th century.

"[48] Free-standing figures share the solidity and frontal stance characteristic of Eastern models, but their forms are more dynamic than those of Egyptian sculpture, as for example the Lady of Auxerre and Torso of Hera (Early Archaic period, c. 660–580 BC, both in the Louvre, Paris).

[52] Archaic reliefs have survived from many tombs, and from larger buildings at Foce del Sele (now in the National Archaeological Museum of Paestum) in Italy, with two groups of metope panels, from about 550 and 510, and the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi, with friezes and a small pediment.

Praxiteles made the female nude respectable for the first time in the Late Classical period (mid-4th century): his Aphrodite of Knidos, which survives in copies, was said by Pliny to be the greatest statue in the world.

Realistic portraits of men and women of all ages were produced, and sculptors no longer felt obliged to depict people as ideals of beauty or physical perfection.

[64] The world of Dionysus, a pastoral idyll populated by satyrs, maenads, nymphs and sileni, had been often depicted in earlier vase painting and figurines, but rarely in full-size sculpture.

Now such works were made, surviving in copies including the Barberini Faun, the Belvedere Torso, and the Resting Satyr; the Furietti Centaurs and Sleeping Hermaphroditus reflect related themes.

[65] At the same time, the new Hellenistic cities springing up all over Egypt, Syria, and Anatolia required statues depicting the gods and heroes of Greece for their temples and public places.

[74] Archaic heroon tombs, for local heroes, might receive large numbers of crudely-shaped figurines, with rudimentary figuration, generally representing characters with raised arms.

At the same time, cities like Alexandria, Smyrna or Tarsus produced an abundance of grotesque figurines, representing individuals with deformed members, eyes bulging and contorting themselves.

Figurines made of metal, primarily bronze, are an extremely common find at early Greek sanctuaries like Olympia, where thousands of such objects, mostly depicting animals, have been found.

Other building types, often not roofed, were the central agora, often with one or more colonnaded stoa around it, theatres, the gymnasium and palaestra or wrestling-school, the ekklesiasterion or bouleuterion for assemblies, and the propylaea or monumental gateways.

[97] Greek cities in Italy such as Syracuse began to put the heads of real people on coins in the 4th century BC, as did the Hellenistic successors of Alexander the Great in Egypt, Syria and elsewhere.

[94] The most artistically ambitious coins, designed by goldsmiths or gem-engravers, were often from the edges of the Greek world, from new colonies in the early period and new kingdoms later, as a form of marketing their "brands" in modern terms.

The ekphrasis was a literary form consisting of a description of a work of art, and we have a considerable body of literature on Greek painting and painters, with further additions in Latin, though none of the treatises by artists that are mentioned have survived.

[101] We have hardly any of the most prestigious sort of paintings, on wood panel or in fresco, that this literature was concerned with, and very few of the copies that undoubtedly existed, equivalent to those which give us most of our knowledge of Greek sculpture.

The tradition of wall painting in Greece goes back at least to the Minoan and Mycenaean Bronze Age, with the lavish fresco decoration of sites like Knossos, Tiryns and Mycenae.

[128] The technique has an ancient tradition in the Near East, and cylinder seals, whose design only appears when rolled over damp clay, from which the flat ring type developed, spread to the Minoan world, including parts of Greece and Cyprus.

[129] Round or oval Greek gems (along with similar objects in bone and ivory) are found from the 8th and 7th centuries BC, usually with animals in energetic geometric poses, often with a border marked by dots or a rim.

Islamic art, where ornament largely replaces figuration, developed the Byzantine plant scroll into the full, endless arabesque, and especially from the Mongol conquests of the 14th century received new influences from China, including the descendants of the Greek vocabulary.

[146] In the East, Alexander the Great's conquests initiated several centuries of exchange between Greek, Central Asian and Indian cultures, which was greatly aided by the spread of Buddhism, which early on picked up many Greek traits and motifs in Greco-Buddhist art, which were then transmitted as part of a cultural package to East Asia, even as far as Japan, among artists who were no doubt completely unaware of the origin of the motifs and styles they used.

The study of vases developed an enormous literature in the late 19th and 20th centuries, much based on the identification of the hands of individual artists, with Sir John Beazley the leading figure.

This assumption has been increasingly challenged in recent decades, and some scholars now see it as a secondary medium, largely representing cheap copies of now lost metalwork, and much of it made, not for ordinary use, but to deposit in burials.

Hades abducting Persephone , 4th-century BC wall painting in the small Macedonian royal tomb at Vergina
Detail of a black-figure vase, c. 540 BC . White, which has not worn well, and a different red-purple are also used. [ 4 ]
Interior of an Attic red-figure cup, about 450 BC
White ground , Attic, c. 460 BC , Cylix of Apollo , who pours a libation , detail. [ 11 ]
Middle Geometric krater , 99 cm high, Attic, c. 800 -775 BC
The Derveni Krater , 4th century BC, with Dionysus and Ariadne seen here. [ 21 ]
Riders from the Parthenon Frieze , around 440 BC.
Kleobis and Biton , kouroi of the Archaic period, c. 580 BC , Delphi Archaeological Museum
The Artemision Bronze , either Poseidon or Zeus , c. 460 BC, National Archaeological Museum , Athens . This masterpiece of classical sculpture was found by fishermen off Cape Artemisium in 1928. It is more than 2 m in height.
"The first true portrait of an individual European": [ 55 ] Roman-era copy of a lost 470 BC bust of Themistocles in Severe style . [ 56 ]
The Venus de Milo , discovered at the Greek island of Milos , 130-100 BC, Louvre
Pottery vessel in the shape of Aphrodite inside a shell; from Attica , Classical Greece , discovered in the Phanagoria cemetery, Taman Peninsula ( Bosporan Kingdom , southern Russia ), 1st quarter of 4th century BC, Hermitage Museum , Saint Petersburg .
Two early Archaic Doric order Greek temples at Paestum , Italy, with much wider capitals than later.
Temple of Hephaistos , Athens , well-preserved mature Doric, late 5th century BC
The reconstructed Athenian Treasury at Delphi
Athenian tetradrachm with head of Athena and owl , after 449 BC. The most acceptable coin in the Mediterranean world.
Gold 20- stater of Eucratides of Bactria c. 150 BC , the largest gold coin of antiquity. 169.2 grams, diameter 58 mm.
One of the Pitsa panels , the only surviving panel paintings from Archaic Greece
Symposium scene in the Tomb of the Diver at Paestum , c. 480 BC
Reconstructed colour scheme of the entablature on a Doric temple
Traces of paint depicting embroidered patterns on the peplos of an Archaic kore , Acropolis Museum
Reconstructed colour scheme on a Trojan archer from the Temple of Aphaia , Aegina .
The Stag Hunt Mosaic , late 4th century BC, from Pella ; the figure on the right is possibly Alexander the Great due to the date of the mosaic along with the depicted upsweep of his centrally-parted hair ( anastole ); the figure on the left wielding a double-edged axe (associated with Hephaistos ) is perhaps Hephaestion , one of Alexander's loyal companions. [ 117 ]
Unswept Floor , Roman copy of the mosaic by Sosus of Pergamon
A domestic floor mosaic depicting Athena , from the "Jewellery Quarter" of Delos , Greece, late 2nd or early 1st century BC
Apollonios of Athens, gold ring with portrait in garnet , c. 220 BC
A typical variety of ornamental motifs on an Attic vase of c. 530 .
Greco-Buddhist frieze of Gandhara with devotees, holding plantain leaves, in Hellenistic style, inside Corinthian columns , 1st–2nd century AD, Buner, Swat, Pakistan , Victoria and Albert Museum
Hypnos and Thanatos carrying the body of Sarpedon from the battlefield of Troy ; detail from an Attic white-ground lekythos , c. 440 BC.