Greek Art and Architecture

B

Mosaics

The labor-intensive art of mosaic began in Greece in the late 5th century bc. The earliest examples are pebble mosaics, in which small black, white, and colored stones were set into mortar on the floors of houses. Some form geometric or floral patterns, while others depict animals, monsters, or myths. Perhaps the finest pebble mosaics were laid in the late 4th century bc on floors at Pella, the ancient capital of Macedonia and birthplace of Alexander the Great. Laid with subtle gradations of colored stones to suggest highlights and shading, such mosaics evidently imitated paintings.

Beginning in the 3rd century bc, another variety of mosaic mimicked painting even more closely. This was tessera mosaic, in which tesserae—small cut cubes of colored stone, glass, or baked clay—were used instead of pebbles. The best tessera mosaics were created in Delos, the island of Rhodes, Alexandria, and Pergamum.

In Pergamum an artisan named Sosus (the only mosaicist mentioned by name in any ancient sources) created a scene of doves perched on the rim of a golden bowl from which they are drinking. This panel was surrounded by another mosaic that depicts, with uncanny realism, scattered bits of garbage—fish-bones, nutshells, and other items—seemingly left over from a banquet and dropped on the floor.

The Romans admired and imitated the illusions and scenes in Hellenistic mosaics. A number of Greek originals seem to have been removed and imported to Italy as Rome’s power expanded throughout the Mediterranean. By the beginning of the 1st century bc mosaicists turned increasingly to abstract patterns. They may have realized that the floor was not the best place to put narrative scenes, as many would appear upside down or sideways to people walking over or seated above them.

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VII

Greek Revivals

A recurring feature of Western art and architecture has been the rise of movements that imitate the images, artistic character, and architectural forms of ancient Greece to establish their own good taste and authority. The tendency to stage such Greek revivals is detectable as early as imperial Rome (see Roman Art and Architecture). Romans filled their environment with original works imported from Greece and with reproductions or variants of those works. For example, the finest surviving portrait sculpture of the Roman emperor Augustus (from the Villa of Livia, Prima Porta, Italy, ad 14?, Vatican Museums) adopts the pose of the Doryphorus of Polyclitus. Augustus’s borrowed pose implies that just as the athlete was the ideal man in Classical Greece, so Augustus was the ideal emperor in Rome.

Knowledge of Greek art and architecture passed to later Europeans by way of Rome, which altered and elaborated upon Greek originals. During the Middle Ages (5th to about 15th centuries) people made no real distinction between Greek and Roman styles. Particularly influential on later European art were Roman sarcophagi (stone coffins), many of them carved in a Greek style to depict Greek myths. In the 13th and 14th centuries, the impact of ancient statuary upon European sculpture became increasingly apparent. For example, around 1337 Italian sculptor Andrea Pisano portrayed a Gothic artist carving a Greek-style nude in a relief called The Art of Sculpture (1337?) for the bell tower of the Florence Cathedral in Italy.

The Renaissance, a term derived from an Italian word meaning “rebirth,” was a period during which both the artistic forms and the ideals of Classical antiquity were revived and renewed. It began in Italy about 1400, spread north, and continued until about 1600. Again, it was primarily Roman sculpture and architecture, rather than the original Greek works, that artists sought to emulate. However, European travelers began to gain more direct experience of Greek originals during the 15th century.

References to Classical art, architecture, and mythology were extremely common in the Renaissance, and a few cases may stand for all. One of the earliest works by Italian artist Michelangelo is a relief showing the Battle of Lapiths and Centaurs (1489-1492, Casa Buonarotti, Florence, Italy). In 1506 Michelangelo was present when the Greek statue of Laocoön and his Sons was unearthed in Rome, and the influence of this work can be seen in his frescoes on the Sistine Chapel ceiling and in other works. A little earlier, Italian architect Bramante designed one of the first Renaissance buildings to imitate ancient architecture, the Tempietto (1502, Rome), a chapel in the form of a round temple set on a classical platform of three steps. The legacy of ancient sculpture became so valued during the Renaissance that in 1515 Pope Leo X appointed artist Raphael to act as commissioner for antiquities.

Later periods of European art are full of works that have classical subjects or have been created in a neoclassical style. During the 17th century, Italian sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini echoed the motion and emotion expressed in Hellenistic sculpture in his David (1623, Galleria Borghese, Rome) and in other works. And the admiration of 18th-century French painter Jacques-Louis David for classical subjects and compositions is evident in neoclassical paintings such as Oath of the Horatii (1784-1785, Louvre, Paris).

Renaissance popes established the first great collections of antiquities since ancient times, and in the 17th century kings and nobles throughout Europe followed their lead, collecting sculpture above all. In the late 18th century the English ambassador to Naples, Sir William Hamilton, gathered the first great collection of Greek vases. The field of archaeology was born about that time, as was art history, which then promoted Greek art and architecture as the ideal. In 1762 English architects James Stuart and Nicholas Revett published important drawings of ancient Athenian buildings.

These developments helped reinforce the dominance of the neoclassical style in architecture throughout Europe from about 1750 through the early 1800s. This style was thought particularly suitable for public buildings. Berlin's Brandenburg Gate (built 1788-1791), for example, was modeled on the Propylaea on the Acropolis. Throughout Europe and the Americas, civic buildings of the early 19th century were similarly inspired by Classical Greek forms.

The first great collection of original Greek sculptures outside Greece is known as the Elgin marbles and consists primarily of sculptures from the metopes, frieze, and pediments of the Parthenon in Athens. The English diplomat Thomas Bruce, earl of Elgin, brought them to England between 1801 and 1806. Originally, Lord Elgin wanted only to make drawings and casts of the Parthenon sculptures to hasten 'the progress of the Fine Arts' in England. However, to prevent the breaking up of the marble for use as building material, he had the sculptures removed from the Acropolis. The British Museum in London acquired them in 1816.

Fifty years before Elgin, the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann wrote that “There is only one way for the moderns to become great and, perhaps, unequalled: by imitating the Ancients.” Although this attitude is no longer in favor, there have been many times in the history of Western art and culture when it was. Even today, the ways we think about, represent, and perceive the world are still largely founded upon the achievements of the ancient Greeks.

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