Gods From The East Frieze Of The Parthenon. Hephaestus, Apollo, and Artemis are seated with their fellow Olympians,
awaiting the procession of the Panathenaic festival, which occupies most of the 160-metre-long frieze, in honour of Athena
(who sits with them).
Their successors include in the Peloponnese Polyclitus, with his essays in human proportions and, in an Athens which under
Pericles had decided to revoke its decision not to rebuild its temples, Phidias. The Phidian school we judge from its
architectural sculpture for Athens and Attica. It did not pursue the nuances of expression of the Olympia Master. Without
the obsessions of a Polyclitus, it evolved a pure Classical style which idealized rather than individualized. At no time in the
history of Greek art was the image of the divine so human, the human so divine. The placidity of the figures, even when
represented in acts of vigour or high emotion, is not empty-headed, but other-worldly. As the body was understood so too
was dress, and it can play its part in conveying the forms of the figure beneath, its action or inaction. Indeed, towards the
end of the century there was a fashion for wind-blown or 'wet' dress, pressed against the body and contrasting with the deep
shadows of the free-hanging or flying folds. With its 'Classic' style the Phidian studio became more than the school of
Greece, since it was the style against which later sculptors' work was ever judged, and which was consciously recaptured by
the artists of early Rome.
In the other arts vase-painting began its decline into fussiness or banality, but still attracted some fine draughtsmen, and the
Attic red-figure style, transplanted to the Greek colonies of south Italy, enjoyed an Indian summer. Wall-painting of the
early Classical period we have to judge from descriptions. On the walls of public buildings at Delphi and Athens
Polygnotus painted great friezes with figures set up and down the field, though without perspective, and presented epic
scenes of Troy and the underworld, and Micon the more recent, but heroically conceived, struggle for freedom at Marathon.
The manner must have been sub-Archaic and, though much admired in later centuries, it was not copied. Their successors
experimented at last with perspective and, more importantly, with realistic shading and coloration, and preferred the smaller