GEOMETRIC AND ORIENTALIZING ART, ca. 900–600BCE
❚Homer lived during the eighth centuryBCE, the era when the city-states of Classical Greece took
shape, the Olympic Games were founded (776BCE), and the Greeks began to trade with their
neighbors to both east and west.
❚Also at this time, the human figure returned to Greek art in the form of bronze statuettes and simple
silhouettes amid other abstract motifs on Geometric vases.
❚Increasing contact with the civilizations of the Near East precipitated the so-called Orientalizing
phase (ca. 700–600BCE) of Greek art, when Eastern monsters began to appear on black-figure vases.
ARCHAIC ART, ca. 600–480BCE
❚Around 600BCE, the first life-size stone statues appeared in Greece. The earliest kouroi emulated the
frontal poses of Egyptian statues, but artists depicted the young men nude, the way Greek athletes
competed at Olympia.
❚During the course of the sixth centuryBCE, Greek sculptors refined the proportions and added
“Archaic smiles” to the faces of their statues to make them seem more lifelike.
❚The Archaic age also saw the erection of the first stone temples with peripteral colonnades and
the codification of the Doric and Ionic orders.
❚The Andokides Painter invented red-figure vase painting around 530BCE. Euphronios and Euthymides
rejected the age-old composite view for the human figure and experimented with foreshortening.
EARLY AND HIGH CLASSICAL ART, ca. 480–400BCE
❚The Classical period opened with the Persian sack of the Athenian Acropolis in 480BCEand the
Greek victory a year later. The fifth centuryBCEwas the golden age of Greece, when Aeschylus,
Sophocles, and Euripides wrote their plays, and Herodotus, the “father of history,” lived.
❚During the Early Classical period (480–450BCE), sculptors revolutionized statuary by introducing
contrapposto (weight shift) to their figures.
❚In the High Classical period (450–400BCE), Polykleitos developed a canon of proportions for the
perfect statue. Iktinos and Kallikrates similarly applied mathematical formulas to temple design
in the belief that beauty resulted from the use of harmonic numbers.
❚Under the patronage of Pericles and the artistic directorship of Phidias, the Athenians rebuilt the
Acropolis after 447BCE. The Parthenon, Phidias’s Athena Parthenos,and the works of Polykleitos
have defined what it means to be “Classical” ever since.
LATE CLASSICAL ART, ca. 400–323BCE
❚In the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War, which ended in 404BCE, Greek artists, while still adhering
to the philosophy that humanity was the “measure of all things,” began to focus more on the real
world of appearances than on the ideal world of perfect beings.
❚Late Classical sculptors humanized the remote deities, athletes, and heroes of the fifth centuryBCE.
Praxiteles, for example, caused a sensation when he portrayed Aphrodite undressed. Lysippos
depicted Herakles as a strong man so weary that he needed to lean on his club for support.
❚In architecture, the ornate Corinthian capital became increasingly popular, breaking the monopoly
of the Doric and Ionic orders.
❚The period closed with Alexander the Great, who transformed the Mediterranean world politically
and ushered in a new artistic age as well.
HELLENISTIC ART, ca. 323–30BCE
❚The Hellenistic age extends from the death of Alexander until the death of Cleopatra, when Egypt
became a province of the Roman Empire. The great cultural centers of the era were no longer the
city-states of Archaic and Classical Greece but royal capitals such as Alexandria in Egypt and
Pergamon in Asia Minor.
❚In art, both architects and sculptors broke most of the rules of Classical design. At Didyma, for
example, a temple to Apollo was erected that had no roof and contained a smaller temple within it.
❚Hellenistic sculptors explored new subjects—Gauls with strange mustaches and necklaces,
impoverished old women—and treated traditional subjects in new ways—athletes with battered
bodies and faces, openly erotic goddesses. Artists delighted in depicting violent movement and
unbridled emotion.
THE BIG PICTURE
ANCIENT GREECE
Dipylon krater, Athens,
ca. 740BCEKroisos, kouros from Anavysos,
ca. 530BCEParthenon, Acropolis, Athens,
447–438BCEPraxiteles, Aphrodite of Knidos,
ca. 350–340BCEAltar of Zeus, Pergamon,
ca. 175BCE