6 ART
. .. and generally art partly completes what nature cannot bring to a finish, and
partly imitates her.
Aristotle, Physics, 2, 8 (199a, 15)
The art of the earliest Bronze Age civilization on Crete and the mainland (the Minoan
and the Mycenaean) is of a high order, as visitors to the remains of the royal palaces
at Cnossus or the great sites at Mycenae or Tiryns and to their accompanying
museums will testify. The fall of Mycenaean civilization initiated a Dark Age out of
which gradually emerged the city state. The art of the city state, despite some limited
continuity with that of the earlier culture, slowly took a new direction, developing the
forms and characteristics that are perfected in the art of the classical age.
Owing to the ravages of time, the history of Greek art can only be painfully
reconstructed from very partial remains. The most complete of the surviving temple
architecture can best be described as ruinous. Very little original sculpture survives
from the classical period; the only complete statues are bronzes rescued from the sea-
bed, whose makers and provenance are unknown. Otherwise we are dependent for
our knowledge on Roman copies and accounts in Roman writers dating from later
time. With more first-hand evidence the history might be substantially different.
The main periods and styles within which art historians also distinguish various
subdivisions are the Geometric, which developed at Athens in the ninth and eight
centuries (these chronological divisions can only be roughly made), the Archaic, in
the seventh and sixth centuries, the Classical in the fifth and fourth, and the Hellenistic
inthe period between the Macedonian conquest in the late fourth century and the
Roman conquest that began in the mid-second century and was completed in the
first.