Greek Art in the Classical Age

Greek art is thought to have reached its peak during the Classical period in the fifth century B.C.E. Leading up to this period, the most common type of sculpture were the kouroi, which were life-size or larger marble statues of nude males that stood on sacred sites, often as grave markers, but also as offerings to the gods. With very stiff, straight poses(they evidently were modeled after Egyptian statues), it is clear that kouroi were not intended to look like real people. However, by the early fifth century, the style of Greek artwork changed. The transition is usually symbolized by the Kritios Boy, a marble statue found in the center of ancient Athens and attributed to Kritios, a sculptor active in Athens around 490-460 B.C.E. It is dated by experts to just before 480 B. C.E. and represents Callias a victor in the boys’ footrace in an athletic competition.The changes from the traditional kouros are slight, but the boy is standing as a boy might actually stand, the right leg forward of the left, which bears the weight of the body so that the right can relax slightly not how artistic convention decrees a hero should pose. Yet this naturalness is achieved without the loss of an idealization (representation as perfect) of the human body. Here is, in the words of the art historian Kenneth Clark. “the first beautiful nude in art.”As John Boardman, an authority on Greek art, puts it: “This is a vital novelty in the history of ancient art-life deliberately observed, understood, and copied. After this all becomes possible.”

There are a few clues as to why this revolution in art, from the stylized to the observed, took place. One is that bronze was becoming the most popular medium in which statues were being created. (It has been suggested that the Kritios Boy is a copy of a bronze original now lost.) The technical problems involved in casting and assembling bronze statues had been solved by the end of the sixth century B.C.E., as the earliest examples show. From the Classical period on bronze predominated in Greek sculpture, but as almost every statue was later melted down so its metals could be reused it is hard to guess this today. The few bronzes to survive (the Riace warriors, the Delphi charioteer and the majestic Zeus found in shipwreck off Cape Artemisium foremost among them) simply highlight what has been lost in quantity and quality. Bronze allowed far greater flexibility in modeling the process of building up a figure in bronze is totally different from cutting into marble. As a wonderful exhibition at the Royal Academy in London in 2012, Bronze, also showed bronze can be burnished (smoothed and shined) to produce a wide variety of aesthetic effects that pure white marble lacks.

The revolution also suggests a preoccupation with human form. While earlier Greek artists were focused on those few human beings who had become heroes, they now seemed concerned with the physical beauty of human beings as an end in itself. It is hard to see the Riace warriors without being aware of their intense sensuality. Yet within a few years this sensuality fades and is replaced by a greater concentration on the nature of the human body as an ideal. It was the sculptor Polycleitos, probably a native of Argos working from the fifth into the fourth century B. C.E., who allied aesthetics with mathematics when he suggested that the perfect human body was perfect precisely because it reflected ideal mathematical proportions that were capable of being discovered. One of his statues, the Doryphoros, or “spear bearer”(originally in bronze, but now known only through Roman copies in marble), was supposed to represent this ideal. If this approach was followed to its extreme, all statues would have had the same, perfect, proportions but the Greeks could not close their eyes to the variety of human experience. There always remained a tension in the art of the period between the abstract ideal of the human body and a particular body copied by the artist. This may be one reason for its aesthetic appeal.?

1.Greek art is thought to have reached its peak during the Classical period in the fifth century B.C.E. Leading up to this period, the most common type of sculpture were the kouroi, which were life-size or larger marble statues of nude males that stood on?sacred?sites, often as grave markers, but also as offerings to the gods. With very stiff, straight poses(they evidently were modeled after Egyptian statues), it is clear that kouroi were not intended to look like real people. However, by the early fifth century, the style of Greek artwork changed. The transition is usually symbolized by the Kritios Boy, a marble statue found in the center of ancient Athens and attributed to Kritios, a sculptor active in Athens around 490-460 B.C.E. It is dated by experts to just before 480 B. C.E. and represents Callias a victor in the boys’ footrace in an athletic competition.The changes from the traditional kouros are slight, but the boy is standing as a boy might actually stand, the right leg forward of the left, which bears the weight of the body so that the right can relax slightly not how artistic convention decrees a hero should pose. Yet this naturalness is achieved without the loss of an idealization (representation as perfect) of the human body. Here is, in the words of the art historian Kenneth Clark. “the first beautiful nude in art.”As John Boardman, an authority on Greek art, puts it: “This is a vital novelty in the history of ancient art-life deliberately observed, understood, and copied. After this all becomes possible.”?