CLASSICAL PERIOD

Classical Art encompasses the cultures of Greece and Rome and endures as the
cornerstone of Western civilization. Including innovations in painting, sculpture, decorative
arts, and architecture, Classical Art pursued ideals of beauty, harmony, and proportion, even
as those ideals shifted and changed over the centuries. While often employed in
propagandistic ways, the human figure and the human experience of space and their
relationship with the gods were central to Classical Art.

Over the span of almost 1200 years, ideals of human beauty and proportion occupied
art's subject. Variations of those ideals were later adopted during the Renaissance in Italy
and again during the 18th and 19th century Neoclassical trend throughout Europe.
Connotations of moral virtue and stability clung to Classical Art, making it attractive to new
nations and republics trying to find an aesthetic vocabulary to convey their power, while,
later, in the 20th century it came under attack by modern artists who sought to disrupt and
overturn power and traditional ideals.

Key Ideas
 The idealized human form soon became the noblest subject of art in Greece and was
the foundation for a standard of beauty that dominated many centuries of Western
art. The Greek ideal of beauty was grounded in a canon of proportions, based on the
golden ratio and the ratio of lengths of body parts to each other, which governed the
depictions of male and female figures.
 While ideal proportions were paramount, Classical Art strove for ever greater realism
in anatomical depictions. This realism also came to encompass emotional and
psychological realism that created dramatic tensions and drew in the viewer.
 Greek temple designs started simply and evolved into more complex and ornate
structures, but later architects translated the symmetrical design and columned
exterior into a host of governmental, educational, and religious buildings over the
centuries to convey a sense of order and stability.
 Perhaps a coincidence, but just as increased archaeological digs turned up
numerous examples of Greek and Roman art, the field of art history was being
developed as a scientific course of study by the likes of Johann Winkelmann.
Winkelmann, often considered the father of art history, based his theories of the
progression of art on the development of Greek art, which he largely knew only from
Roman copies. Since the middle of the 18th century, art historical and classical
tradition have been intimately entwined.
 While Greek and Roman sculpture and ruins are linked with the purity of white
marble in the Western mind, most of the works were originally polychrome, painted in
multiple, lifelike colors. 18th century excavations unearthed a number of sculptures
with traces of color, but noted art historians dismissed the findings as anomalies. It
was only in the late 20th century that scholars accepted that life-size statues and
entire temple friezes were, in fact, brightly painted with numerous colors and
decorations, raising many new questions about the assumptions of Western art
history and revealing that centuries of classical imitations were not in fact imitations
but rather based on nostalgic ideals of the past.
 For the most part, the Greeks created their free-standing sculpture in bronze, but
because bronze is valuable and can be melted down and reused, sculpture was often
recast into weapons. This is why so few ancient Greek bronze originals survive, and
why we often have to look at ancient Roman copies in marble (of varying quality) to
try to understand what the Greeks achieved.