The masks worn by the actors in Greek tragedies and comedies were quite large, with exaggerated expressions, for the benefit of audience members who were seated some distance from the stage. One reason we know this is the often-detailed decorations on Athenian pottery, the subjects of
Which could be anything from mythological stories to household scenes to country farms (see page 68). Another popular art form in ancient Greece was wall painting. Though none of those works survive, we can get an idea of what the wall art looked like from copies painted onto pottery. Most of the pottery that survived the centuries intact has been found in tombs.
Corinth was the most prominent producer of Greek pottery in the seventh and eighth centuries B. C.E. The typical Greek style of black figures painted on orange or red clay vases or other containers developed in Corinth, whose potters were influenced by Near Eastern styles featuring geometric patterns and animal figures. However, the black silhouette figures on Corinthian pottery reveal little about their life or religion.
The clay in Attica contains an element, illite, that gives its pottery glaze a beautiful sheen, and by the sixth century b. c.e. Athenian pottery was the dominant product and was imitated by the Corinthians. One market-savvy Athenian craftsman, Nicosthenes (d. c. 505 b. c.e.), made a steady business of selling his work to the Etruscans in Italy by decorating his pottery with popular Etruscan themes, such as boxing and reproductions of scenes from Etruscan artwork. Some pottery was whimsical, such as the cup found in Attica and dated to about 460 b. c.e. that is shaped like a cow’s hoof and painted with a scene of a farmer and his cow.
An innovation in Athenian pottery dating from about 525 B. C.E. was the reverse of the black figure drawings; figures or objects were left unpainted but were given detail by etched-in lines, while the background was painted black. These painted pots offered detailed views of life in Athens. Winners of athletic competitions often received as a prize painted vases filled with olive oil from the trees of the sacred grove of Athena in the Academy.
By the fourth century B. C.E. Athens was in decline economically and production of its famous vases died out as the pottery of southern Italy came into vogue. But fortunately, a number of painted vases survive from Athens’s heyday, giving historians a vividly detailed pictorial lesson in ancient Greek life and culture.
Sculpture Transformed
The artwork of the ancient Greeks began on a small scale with intricately carved jewelry that has been found dating to the 10th and ninth centuries B. C.E. While Greek potters were producing more and more naturalistic images on their wares, Greek sculptors were gaining confidence and skill working with stone. The first Greek sculptor of note was the legendary Daedalus (see the box on page 101), who perhaps lived in the late Bronze
Age. A style of sculpture featuring small, abstract figures with triangular faces is called Daedalic in his honor, though the unknown artists who made them were influenced by the art of the Near East. Sixth-century B. C.E. Greek sculpture looked Egyptian: strait-backed, stylized nude male figures called kouros faced forward with arms down at their sides and the left foot slightly in front of the right. A female version was a draped figure, and was usually placed in cemeteries. Eventually, relief sculpture (threedimensional images that emerge from a flat or curved surface) began to be added to the bases of the kouroi statues.
By the fifth century B. C.E., Greek artists and writers were aware that the Greeks were building a new political and military force in the world, and they wanted to both honor their culture and distance themselves from the foreign models they had once copied. In sculpture, this led to greater realism and the depiction of action, as in the Discobolus (“discus thrower”) sculpted by Myron of Eleutherae (c. 490-430 B. C.E.). Like all of his work, it was cast in bronze, but the only versions of it remaining are Roman copies in marble (see page 112). Sculptor Polyclitus (464-420 B. C.E.) spent his long career in Argos, where he ran a school. His sculpture was representative of the Greek admiration for symmetry, or balanced proportions, in art or architecture. The Greeks believed symmetry reflected perfection and that humans should imitate it in their art. Polyclitus’s statue Doryphorus, or “spear-bearer,” shows a muscular man with a taut arm and relaxed leg on one side of the body, while the figure’s other arm and leg are just the opposite.
Formal Portrait
This kouros from Attica (c. 525 B. C.E.) illustrates the stiff, formal style the early Greeks favored. Contrast it with the very natural sculpture on page 87-a style that revolutionized art.
The style of Polyclitus fit into an ideal of Greek art that dated back to the kouros, of trying to represent the perfect body in art. Polyclitus began a trend among sculptors, who copied his proportions and began featuring more humans, rather than deities, in their work. Attention to every detail of the subject matter, such as the folds on a cloak, showed the great technical skill developed during this period, and influenced artists for centuries to come.
Polyclitus and his competitor Phidias (c. 500-c. 432 B. C.E.) were the masters during the Classical period of Greek art. The Roman historian Pliny the Elder (23-79 C. E.) wrote that from Polyclitus’s statue the Canon, other sculptors “derive the basic forms of their art, as if from some kind of law” (quoted in The Art of Ancient Greece by J. J. Pollitt).
World History
