Classical Greek Art
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In Greece, painting
first ceased to be subordinate to
architecture, and became independent. Greek painters used home made
pigments, individual to each artist. The recipes were guarded closely
and handed down generation to generation. Most home-made pigments were
created from bone, charcoal, ground stone, and naturally occurring earth
pigments.
According to art historian, Walter Pater, "The supreme Hellenic culture is a sharp edge of light across this gloom. The fiery, stupefying wine becomes in a happier climate clear and exhilarating. The Dorian worship of Apollo, rational, chastened, debonair, with his unbroken daylight, always opposed to the sad Chthonian divinities, is the aspiring element, by force and spring of which Greek religion sublimes itself. Out of Greek religion, under happy conditions, arises Greek art, to minister to human culture. It was the privilege of Greek religion to be able to transform itself into an artistic ideal."
In early days, there was skill in the ornamentation of vases and in mural painting. Yet, with much spirit and feeling, there was a conventional treatment. The earliest artist of whom we know much is Polygnotus, about 420 B.C., whose groups of profile figures were described as remarkable for their life-like character and fine coloring. Apollodorus of Athens was distinguished, but Zeuxis of Heraclea is said to have been the first to paint movable pictures. He is famed for his marvelous power of imitation: the birds pecked at a bunch of grapes which he painted. But even he was outdone by Parrhasius. Zeuxis, however, had far higher qualities than those of a literal copyist. The most successful of the Greek painters was Apelles. Among his masterpieces was a painting of Venus rising from the waves, and a portrait of Alexander the Great. We have not in painting, as in sculpture, a store of monuments of Greek art; but the skill of the Greeks in painting fell behind their unequaled genius in molding the human form in bronze and marble.
The Greeks more and
more broke away in a free
and joyous spirit from the stiff and conventional styles of Egyptian and
Oriental art. In the room of the somber, massive edifices of Egypt, they
combined symmetry and beauty with grandeur in the temples which they
erected. The temples were originally colored
within and without. Three
styles were developed, the Doric, the Ionic, and the Corinthian.
In the Doric, the column and entablature have the most solid and simple
form. The column has no other base than the common platform on which the
pillars rest, and the capital that surmounts it is a plain slab.
Originality is a distinguishing trait in Classic Greek Art. Whatever the Greeks borrowed from others they made their own, and reproduced in a form peculiar to themselves. They were never servile copyists. A spirit of humanity, in the broad sense of the term, pervades their painting, sculpture and mosaics. Their sense of form, including a perception of beauty, of harmony and proportion--made them the leaders of Western Civilization. -Richard Muther, The History of Painting, Henry and Co., London, 1896
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