Detail Of The Battle Of Gods And Giants: frieze of the Altar of Zeus and Athena at Pergamum (c. 166-159 B.C.). Athena seizes the
giant Alcyoneus by the hair and wrenches him away from his mother Ge (Earth), while Victory flies in to place a wreath on Athena's
head. A good example of the bombast and virtuosity of this most extravagant of ancient sculptural creations.
While the great frieze denied the existence of the background, the smaller frieze of the interior court turned it into real space. This
frieze, which told the story of Pergamum's legendary founder Telephus, a romantic tale of a type much favoured among Hellenistic
court poets, employed a continuous narrative technique in which the same characters appeared again and again at different moments
of time. Each episode ran on from the previous one without a break, but the shifting setting was indicated by landscape elements: the
sacred laurel tree of Delphi, hangings in Aleos' palace, the oak forest in which Heracles seduced Auge. More striking, the figures
occupied only two-thirds of the height of the frieze, so that the upper third was available for rocks, foliage, architectural members,
and so forth, or could alternatively be left free to suggest sky. Sometimes a hint of perspective was conveyed by the placing of
certain figures above those in the foreground: that they were not merely conceived as at a higher level is indicated by their slightly
smaller scale. This 'activation' of the background, which surely owed much to the influence of painting, -was echoed, in more
tentative fashion, on a number of minor Hellenistic reliefs but was to be more fully exploited only in Roman times.
Painting and the Other Arts
Pictorial reliefs bring us naturally to painting. Here, however, much less can be said, because there is almost no direct evidence apart
from funerary paintings in one or two Macedonian chamber tombs and on gravestones from Alexandria and Demetrias in Thessaly.
Major paintings probably continued to be carried out mainly on wooden panels. Alexander's reign was evidently a highpoint in the
history of pictorial art, to judge from the literary references to the work of his court painter Apelles, at least three of whose famous
masterpieces were later displayed in Rome. This golden age of painting continued at the courts of the Successors, who
commissioned various works to commemorate the achievements of the great Macedonian. We hear of at least two multi-figure