with no less subtlety in architecture. It is demonstrated by the shapes of vases, by the articulation of the decoration upon
them, by the suiting of a subject's size and pose to its field. It determined the shape and decoration of an eighth-century
Geometric vase no less than it did the Parthenon pediments. The challenge in Greek art which guaranteed movement and
progress was the desire to reconcile what might seem uncompromising opposites, the instinctive sense of pattern and
proportion, and the growing awareness of what might be expressed through a more accurate representation of natural forms.
Stimuli and Origins
The greatest stimulus to progress and belief in a future is knowledge and understanding of a past. The Greek of the ninth
century B.C., living in a sparsely populated country, in a manner seldom rising above the austere, had around him the
evidence of the civilization of his predecessors, the Bronze Age Mycenaeans and Minoans. The massive stones of their
citadels were built by giants. The gold and ivory on their deserted sites and cemeteries showed where gods had walked with
men, and where gods should, therefore, still be worshipped. The techniques of the past were lost when the Bronze Age
palace societies crumbled. There was physical survival, and some cultural survival, notably in areas less disturbed by the
break-up of the old world, as in Crete, but on the whole this evidence of their past stood more as a challenge than as a
model to be copied, and although we may discern in the Mycenaean something of those qualities which later distinguish
Greek art, physically there is virtually a new start, a renaissance. It was bred on formal patterns which mainly derived from
the older repertory, but were executed with a new discipline and balance. Greek art had been given a false start in the
Bronze Age by the dominant modes of the non-Greek Minoans. Fortunately, the new Geometric arts of Greece could
respond differently and profitably to foreign inspiration.
The style is best expressed on painted vases, but can be seen on metal-work as well. Proto-Geometric artists (mainly of the
tenth century) had subjected the free curvilinear patterns of the past to the authority of the compass. Rectilinear patterns-the
meander, zig-zag, swastika-provided the main themes in Geometric art (ninth to eighth centuries) and beside them crept in
simple figure subjects-a mourner on a grave vase, the prestigious symbol of a horse, pattern bands of animal bodies. After
barely a generation of experiment with scenes of human figures, some in action, the Athenian Dipylon Master was able to
offer on his vases the classic statement of Geometric art, panels of pattern which are resolved into figures of mourners and
the dead in the ritual of laying out (pro-thesis) and burial. The scenes are not demonstrably other than of contemporary
practice. The silhouette figures, composed of geometric patterns, can step beyond being symbols for man to some
expression of his behaviour, by nuances of gesture or drawing, but something more was needed to translate this art into a
medium for greater narrative expression.