How Did the Emphasis on the Classics Affect the Art Literature and Architecture of the Period?

Ancestry of Classical Greek and Roman Art and Architecture

Mycenaean Influences 1600-1100 BCE

<i>The Mask of Agamemnon</i> (1550-1500 BCE) was discovered in 1876 at Mycenae by the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, who, trying to bear witness the historical accuracy of ancient accounts of the Trojan War, identified the gold <i>repoussé</i> death mask as that of the tragic Greek king.

Considered the offset Greeks, the Mycenaeans had a lasting influence on later Greek art, architecture, and literature. A bronze age civilisation that extended through modern day southern Greece as well equally coastal regions of modern day Turkey, Italia, and Syria, Mycenaea was an elite warrior society dominated by palace states. Divided into three classes - the male monarch'south attendants, the common people, and slaves - each palace land was ruled past a king with military, political, and religious authority. The society valorized heroic warriors and fabricated offerings to a pantheon of gods. In later Greek literature, including Homer'southward The Iliad and The Odyssey, the exploits of these warriors and gods engaged in the Trojan War had become legendary and, in fact, appropriated past later Greeks as their founding myths.

The Lion Gate (1250 BCE) at the entrance to a citadel in Mycenae exemplifies Cyclopean masonry and is the only surviving large scale Mycenaean sculpture.

Agriculture and merchandise were the economic engines driving Mycenaean expansion, and both activities were enhanced past the engineering genius of the Mycenaeans, as they synthetic harbors, dams, aqueducts, drainage systems, bridges, and an extended network of roads that remained unrivaled until the Roman era. Innovative architects, they developed Cyclopean masonry, using large boulders, fit together without mortar, to create massive fortifications. The proper name for Cyclopean stonework came from the subsequently Greeks, who believed that only the Cyclops, fierce one-eyed giants of myth and legend, could have lifted the stones. To lighten the heavy load above gates and doorways, the Mycenaeans also invented the relieving triangle, a triangular space to a higher place the lintel that was left open or filled with lighter materials.

This fragment of a fresco (13<sup>th</sup> century BCE) from the acropolis of Mycenae may depict a goddess or a priestess.

The Mycenaeans first developed the acropolis, a fortress or citadel, built on a colina that characterized later on Greek cities. The king's palace, centered on a megaron, or round throne room with four columns, was decorated with vividly colored frescoes of marine life, battle, processions, hunting, and gods and goddesses.

This bust of Homer, a Roman re-create of a 2<sup>nd</sup> century BCE Greek original, shows the epic poet who, according to legend, was blind.

Scholars still debate how the Mycenaean civilisation declined, and theories include invasions, internal conflict, and natural disasters. The era was followed by what has been called the Greek Dark Ages, though it is as well known as the Homeric Age and the Geometric period. The term Homeric Age refers to Homer whose poems narrated the Trojan War and its aftermath. The term Geometric period refers to the era's style of vase painting, which primarily employed geometric motifs and patterns.

Greek Archaic Period 776-480 BCE

This amphora (c 570-565 BCE) shows a number of warriors in combat depicted in the black-figure style.

The Archaic Period began in 776 BCE with the establishment of the Olympic Games. Greeks believed that the athletic games, which emphasized human being achievement, set up them apart from "barbarian," non-Greek peoples. The Greeks' valorization of the Mycenaean era as a heroic gilt historic period led them to idealize male athletes, and the male effigy became dominant subjects of Greek art. The Greeks felt that the male nude showed non only the perfection and beauty of the body but likewise the nobility of character.

The Greeks adult a political and social structure based upon the polis, or city-state. While Argus was a leading center of trade in the early office of the era, Sparta, a metropolis land that emphasized military prowess, grew to exist the most powerful. Athens became the pioneering force in the art, culture, scientific discipline, and philosophy that became the basis of Western civilization. Though the era was dominated by the dominion of tyrants, Solon, a philosopher male monarch, became the ruler of Athens around 594 BCE and established notable reforms. He created the Quango of Iv Hundred, a body that could question and challenge the king, ended the practice of putting people into slavery for their debts, and established a ruling class based on wealth rather than descent. Extensive sea-faring merchandise drove the Greek economic system, and Athens, forth with other metropolis-states, began establishing trading posts and settlements throughout the Mediterranean. As a issue of these forays, Greek cultural values spread to other cultures, including the Etruscans in southern Italy, influencing and co-mingling with them.

<i>New York Kouros</i> (c. 598-580 BCE), so dubbed for its being housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, follows the rules of proportion for the human figure, as well as the frontal facing pose, established by the Egyptians, while showing the Greek tendency toward more realistic anatomical modeling and the suggestion of movement.

Figurative sculpture was the greatest artistic innovation of the Archaic period as it emphasized realistic, though idealized, figures. Influenced past Egyptian sculpture, the Greeks transformed the frontal poses of pharaohs and other notables into works known equally kouros (young men) and kore (immature women), life-sized sculptures that were first adult in the Cyclades islands in the seventh century BCE. During the belatedly Archaic catamenia, private sculptors, including Antenor, Kritios, and Nesiotes, were celebrated, and their names preserved for posterity.

This Roman marble statue group is a copy of <i>The Tyrannicides</i> by Kritios and Nesioes (c. 477 BCE)

The late Archaic period was marked by new reforms, as the Athenian lawgiver Cleisthenes established new policies in 508BC that led to him being dubbed "the father of democracy." To gloat the end of the rule of tyrants, he commissioned the sculptore Antenor to complete a statuary statue, The Tyrannicides (510 BCE), depicting Harmonides and Aristogeion, who had assassinated Hipparchos, the blood brother of the tyrant Hippias, in 514 BCE. Though the two were executed for the offense, they became symbols of the movement toward democracy that led to the expulsion of Hippias four years later and were considered to be the only contemporary Greeks worthy enough to be granted immortality in art. The committee of Antenor's piece of work was the first public funded art commission, and the subject was then resonant that, when Antenor's work was taken during the 483 BCE Persian invasion, Kritios was commissioned to create a replacement. Kritios's The Tyrannicides (c. 477 BCE) adult what has been called the severe style, or the Early Classical style, as he depicted realistic movement and private label, which had a great influence on subsequent sculpture.

Classical Greece 480-323 BCE

This Roman bust with the inscription

Classical Hellenic republic, as well known as the Golden Historic period, became fundamental both to the subsequently Roman Empire and western civilization, in philosophy, politics, literature, science, fine art, and architecture. The great Greek historian of the era Thucydides, called the general and populist statesman Pericles "Athens'due south offset denizen." Equal rights for citizens (which only meant adult Greek males), democracy, freedom of speech, and a social club ruled by an assembly of citizens defined Greek government. Pericles launched the rebuilding of the Parthenon (447-432 BCE) in Athens, a project overseen by his friend, the sculptor Phidias, and established Athens as the most powerful city state, expanding its influence throughout the Mediterranean region.

Raphael'southward <i>The School of Athens</i> (1511), a famous Renaissance fresco, shows the long lasting influence and importance of the Greek philosophers, as Aristotle and Plato are depicted at the center.

The Classical era as well saw the establishment of Western philosophy in the teachings and writings of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. The philosophy of Socrates survived through Plato's written accounts of his teacher's dialogues, and Plato went on to found the Academy in Athens around 387 BCE, an early prototype of all afterwards academies and universities. Many leaders studied at the Academy, including most notably Aristotle, and it became a leading force known throughout the world for the importance of scientific and philosophical inquiry based upon the belief in reason and knowledge. While their philosophies diverged in primal respects, Plato and Aristotle concurred in seeing fine art as an false of nature, aspiring to the beautiful.

This Roman copy depicts Praxiteles's <i>Aphrodite of Knidos</i> (iv<sup>th</sup> century BCE), the first life-sized Greek female nude.

Additionally, the accent on individuality resulted in a more personalized art, and individual artists, including Phidias, Praxiteles, and Myron, became celebrated. Funerary sculpture began depicting real people (instead of idealized types) with emotional expression, while at the same time, statuary works arcadian the man form, particularly the male nude. Praxiteles, though, pioneered the female person nude in his Aphrodite of Knidos (quaternary century BCE), a work that has been referenced fourth dimension and time again in the ensuing centuries.

Hellenistic Greek 323-31 BCE

The expiry of Alexander the Corking in 323 BCE marked the beginning of the Hellenistic period. Having amassed a vast empire beyond Greece that included parts of Asia, North Africa, Europe and not having named a successor instigated a war between Alexander's generals for control of his empire, and local leaders jockeyed to regain control of their regions. Eventually, three generals agreed to a ability-sharing relationship and carved the Greek empire into three dissimilar regions. While the mainland Greek cultural influence declined, Alexandria in Arab republic of egypt and Antioch in modern twenty-four hours Syria became important centers of Hellenistic culture. Many Greeks emigrated to other parts of the fractured empire, "Hellenizing the world," equally fine art historian John Griffiths Pedley wrote.

This Roman marble copy was based upon <i>Eros Stringing a Bow</i>, a 4<sup>th-</sup>century bronze by Lysippus.

Despite the splintering of the empire, great wealth led to imperial patronage of the arts, especially in sculpture, painting, and architecture. Alexander the Bully's official sculptor had been Lysippus who, working in bronze after Alexander's death, created works that marked a transition from the Classical to the Hellenistic style. Some of the almost famous works of Greek art, including the Venus de Milo (130-100 BCE) and the Winged Victory of Samothrace (200-190 BCE) were created in the era.

This photograph depicts a partial view of the <i>Pergamon Altar</i> (c. 166-156 BCE). It was reconstructed in 1930 in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin.

Architecture turned toward urban planning, as cities created complex parks and theaters for leisure. Temples took on colossal proportions, and the architectural mode employed the Corinthian order, the most decorative of Classical orders. Pergamon became a vital centre of culture, known for its colossal complexes, as exemplified by in the Pergamon Chantry (c. 166-156 BCE) with its all-encompassing and dramatic friezes. During the Hellenistic catamenia, the Greeks gradually fell to the rule of the Roman Republic, as Rome conquered Macedonia in the Battle of Corinth in 146 BCE. Upon his decease in 133 BCE, Rex Attalus III left the Kingdom of Pergamon to the Romans. Though Greek rebellions followed, they were crushed in the following century.

Roman Democracy 509 BCE - 26 CE

Rembrandt'due south <i>Lucretia</i> (1664) depicts the tragic account of Lucretia's suicide that led to the founding of the Roman Republic.

Rome began as a urban center-state ruled past kings, who were elected by the nobleman of the Roman Senate, and then became a Republic when Lucius Tarquinii Superbus, the final king, was expelled in 509BC. Because his son had raped Lucretia, a married noblewoman, who took her own life, Tarquinii was deposed past her husband, her begetter, and Lucius Junius Brutus, Tarquinii's nephew. The story became both function of Roman history and a discipline depicted in art throughout the following centuries.

This photograph shows Paul Bigot's gimmicky model of Rome, showing the Circus Maximus, first developed in the 6<sup>th</sup> century BCE, at the left, the Colosseum at the far right, and the urban grid planning of Rome, including blocks of apartment buildings.

With the kingship abolished, the Commonwealth was established with a new system of government led by two consuls. As the patricians, the upper class who governed Rome, were often in disharmonize with the plebeians, or mutual people, an emphasis was put upon city planning, including apartment buildings chosen insulae and public entertainments that featured gladiator fights and horse races to keep the people happy, a type of rule that the Roman poet Juvenal described every bit "bread and circuses." Cities were planned on a grid organization, while architecture and engineering projects were transformed past the development of physical in the threerd century. Rome was primarily a war machine country, frequently at war with neighboring tribes in Italy at the beginning. Various military machine campaigns resulted in the conquest and destruction of Carthage, a Due north African kingdom, in 3 Punic wars, the conquest of the Macedonia and its eastern territories, and Hellenic republic in the iind century BCE resulted in geographically expansive empire.

The <i>Tusculum portrait</i> (40-50 BCE), a copy of a bronze original, is a rare portrait of Julius Caesar created in his lifetime.

Roman civilisation adopted many of the myths, gods, and heroic stories of the Greeks, while emphasizing their own tradition of the mas majorum, the style of the ancestors, a kind of contractual obligation with the gods and the founding fathers of Rome. Greek works, taken as spoils of war, were extensively copied and displayed in Roman homes and became a principal influence upon Roman art and architecture. The rise of Julius Caesar, following his triumph over the Gauls in northern Europe, marked the stop of the Democracy, as he was assassinated in 44 BCE by a number of senators in society to forbid him being declared emperor. His death plunged the Republic into a ceremonious war, fought by his former general Marc Antony allied with Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, against the forces of Pompeius and the forces of Caesar's great nephew and heir, Octavian.

Purple Rome 27 BCE - 393 CE

Angelica Kauffman's <i>Virgil reading the Aeneid to Augustus and Octavia</i> (1788) is a Neoclassical treatment that depicts the Emperor and his sis Octavia, who has fainted following Virgil's reading of the part of the <i>Aeneid</i> that honored her dead son Marcellus.

While the assassins may take staved off the crowning of Caesar equally emperor, somewhen an emperor was named. Imperial Rome begins with the crowning of Octavian as the first emperor, who came to exist known equally Augustus. In his almost twoscore-five year reign, he transformed the urban center, establishing public services, including the first constabulary, fire fighting strength, postal organization, and municipal offices, while creating revenue and revenue enhancement systems that were the blueprint for the Empire in the following centuries. He also launched a new building program that included temples and notable public buildings, and he transformed the arts, commissioning works like the Augustus of Prima Porta (ist century CE) that depicted him as an ideal leader in a classical style that harkened back to Hellenic republic. He also commissioned The Aeneid (29-19 BCE) an epic poem by the poet Virgil that defined Rome and became a approved work of Western literature. The poem described the mythical founding of Rome, relating the journey of Aeneas, the son of Venus and Prince of Troy, who fled the Sack of Troy to get in in Italia, where, fighting and defeating the Etruscan rulers, he founded Rome.

The Imperial era was divers by the awe-inspiring grandeur of its compages and its luxurious lifestyle, every bit wealthy residences were lavishly busy with colorful frescoes, and the upper class, throughout the Empire, deputed portraits. The Empire ended with the Sack of Rome in 393 CE, though by that time, its ability had already declined, due to increasingly capricious emperors, internal conflict, and rebellion in its provinces. The conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity and the moving of the imperial majuscule from Rome to Constantinople in 313 CE established the rising ability of the Byzantine Empire.

Classical Greek and Roman Art and Architecture: Concepts, Styles, and Trends

The Golden Ratio

This <i>Bosom of Socrates</i> is believed to exist a one<sup>st</sup> century CE Roman copy of the original four<sup>thursday</sup> century BCE bronze by Lysippus.

The Greeks believed that truth and beauty were closely associated, and noted philosophers understood beauty in largely mathematical terms. Socrates said, "Measure and proportion manifest themselves in all areas of beauty and virtue," and Aristotle advocated for the gilt mean, or the middle mode, that led to a virtuous and heroic life by avoiding extremes. For the Greeks, beauty derived from the combination of symmetry, harmony, and proportion. The golden ratio, a concept based on the proportions between two quantities, every bit defined by the mathematicians Pythagoras (vith century BCE) and Euclid (323-283 BCE), was idea to exist the well-nigh beautiful proportion. The golden ratio indicates that the ratio between ii quantities is the aforementioned every bit the ratio between the larger of the two and their sum. The Parthenon (447-432 BCE) employed the aureate ratio in its blueprint and was fêted as the near perfect edifice imaginable. Because the artist Phidias oversaw the building of the temple, the golden ratio became commonly known by the Greek letter phi, in award of Phidias. The aureate ratio had a noted impact on later artists and architects, influencing the Roman architect Vitruvius, whose principles informed the Renaissance, as seen in the work and theory of Leon Battista Alberti, and modernistic architects, including Le Corbusier.

Greek Architecture

This epitome from <i>The Eastern Nations and Hellenic republic</i> (1917) illustrates the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders, from left to right.

Best known for its temples, using a rectangular design framed by colonnades open up on all sides, Greek architecture emphasized formal unity. The building became a sculptural presence on a high loma, as art historian Nikolaus Pevsner wrote, "The plastic shape of the [Greek] temple ... placed before u.s.a. with a physical presence more intense, more live than that of whatever afterward building."

The Greeks developed the three orders - the Doric, the Ionic, and the Corinthian - which became part of the fundamental architectural vocabulary of Rome and subsequently much of Europe and the United states of america. Developed in different parts of Hellenic republic and at different times, the distinction between the orders is primarily based upon the differences between the columns themselves, their capitals, and the entablature above them. The Doric order is the simplest, using polish or fluted columns with round capitals, while the entablature features add a more complex decorative chemical element to a higher place the uncomplicated columns. The Ionic cavalcade uses volutes, from the Latin word for scroll, as a decorative element at the top of the upper-case letter, and the entablature is designed so that a narrative frieze extends the length of the building. The late Classical Corinthian order, named for the Greek city of Corinth, is the almost decorative, using elaborately carved capitals with an acanthus leaf motif.

Polycleitus the Younger, the son of the noted sculptor Polycleitus, designed the ancient Greek theater (4th century BCE) at Epidauros.

Originally, Greek temples were often built with wood, using a kind of mail and beam construction, though stone and marble were increasingly employed. The start temple to be built entirely of marble was the Parthenon (447-432 BCE). Greek architecture also pioneered the amphitheater, the agora, or public foursquare surrounded by a pillar, and the stadium.The Romans appropriated these architectural structures, creating monumental amphitheaters and revisioning the agora as the Roman forum, an extensive public square that featured hundreds of marble columns.

Roman Architecture and Applied science

The Colosseum (72-80 CE), one of the most famous of Roman structures, could hold up to 60,000 spectators for the gladiatorial games and animal hunts staged there.

Roman architecture was then innovative that it has been called the Roman Architectural Revolution, or the Physical Revolution, based on its invention of concrete in the threerd century. The technological evolution meant that the grade of a construction was no longer constrained by the limitations of brick and masonry and led to the innovative employment of the curvation, the barrel vault, the groin vault, and the dome. These new innovations ushered in an age of monumental architecture, as seen in the Colosseum and civil engineering science projects, including aqueducts, apartment buildings, and bridges. The Romans, as architectural historian D.S. Robertson wrote, "were the first builders in Europe, perhaps the first in the world, fully to appreciate the advantages of the arch, the vault and the dome." They pioneered the segmental arch - substantially a flattened arch, used in bridges and private residences - the extended curvation, and the triumphal arch, which historic the emperors' great victories. But information technology was their employment of the dome that had the most significant impact on Western civilisation. Though influenced by the Etruscans, particularly in their use of arches and hydraulic techniques, and the Greeks, Romans still used columns, porticos, and entablatures fifty-fifty when technological innovations no longer required them structurally.

Leonardo da Vinci's <i>Vitruvian Man</i> (1490) was based upon the human proportions derived by Vitruvius.

Though little is known of his life beyond his work as a armed forces engineer for Emperor Augustus, Vitruvius was the most noted Roman builder and engineer, and his De architectura (On Architecture) (30-15 BCE), known as Ten Books on Compages, became a approved work of subsequent architectural theory and practice. His treatise was dedicated to Emperor Augustus, his patron, and was meant to be a guide for all manner of edifice projects. His work described town planning, residential, public, and religious building, equally well as building materials, h2o supplies and aqueducts, and Roman machinery, such as hoists, cranes, and siege machines. Every bit he wrote, "Architecture is a science arising out of many other sciences, and adorned with much and varied learning." His belief that a structure should have the qualities of stability, unity, and beauty became known as the Vitruvian Triad. He saw architecture imitating nature in its proportionality and ascribed this proportionality to the human being form as well, famously expressed afterwards in Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man (1490).

Vase Painting

The Hirschfeld Krater (mid-8th century BCE), showing a scene of a procession carrying a body to the tomb, exemplifies a late Geometric work.

Vase painting was a noted element of Greek art and provides the best example of how Greek painting focused primarily on portraying the human form and evolved toward increased realism. The earliest style was geometric, employing patterns influenced by Mycenaean art, but speedily turned to the human being figure, similarly stylized. An "Orientalizing" period followed, as Eastern motifs, including the sphinx, were adopted to exist followed by a black effigy style, named for its color scheme, that used more than accurate detail and figurative modeling.

The Classical era developed the red figure way of vase painting, which created the figures past strongly outlining them against a black background and allowed for their details to be painted rather than incised into the clay. Equally a result, variations of colour and of line thickness allowed for more curving and rounded shapes than were present in the Geometric style of vases.

Greek and Roman Painting

<i>Hades Abducting Persephone</i> (iv<sup>th</sup> century BCE) portrays the god of the underworld in his chariot, abducting Persephone, while a woman at the lower right looks up in horror.

While Classical Art is noted primarily for its sculpture and architecture, Greek and Roman artists made innovations in both fresco and panel painting. Most of what is known of Greek painting is ascertained primarily from painting on pottery and from Etruscan and afterward Roman murals, which are known to have been influenced by Greek artists and, sometimes, painted by them, as the Greeks established settlements in Southern Italian republic where they introduced their art. Hades Abducting Persephone (4 thursday century BCE) in the Vergina tombs in Macedonia is a rare instance of a Classical era mural painting and shows an increased realism that parallels their experiments in sculpture.

This fresco from the Villa of Mysteries (80 BCE) is believed to depict a religious rite, as women or the Bacchae, worshipped the god Dionysius.

Roman console and fresco paintings survived in greater number than Greek paintings. The 1748 digging of Pompeii, a Roman metropolis that was buried almost instantaneously in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE, led to the groundbreaking discovery of many relatively well-preserved frescos in noted Roman residences, including the Firm of the Vettii, the Villa of Mysteries, and the House of the Tragic Poet. Fresco paintings brought a sense of light, infinite, and color into interiors that, defective windows, were oftentimes dark and cramped. Preferred subjects included mythological accounts, tales from the Trojan war, historical accounts, religious rituals, erotic scenes, landscapes, and nonetheless lifes. Additionally, walls were sometimes painted to resemble brightly colored marble or alabaster panels, enhanced by illusionary beams or cornices.

Greek Sculpture

This <i>kouros</i>, named the

Influenced by the Egyptians, the Greeks in the Archaic flow began making life-sized sculptures, but rather than portraying pharaohs or gods, Greek sculpture largely consisted of kouroi, of which there were 3 types - the nude boyfriend, the dressed and standing young woman, and a seated woman. Famous for their smiling expressions, dubbed the "Primitive smile", the sculptures were used as funerary monuments, public memorials, and votive statues. They represented an ideal blazon rather than a detail private and emphasized realistic anatomy and human movement, every bit New York Times art critic Alastair Macaulay wrote, "The kouros is timeless; he might be about to exhale, movement, speak."

This Roman bronze is a smaller re-create of Myron's <i>Discobolos</i> (460-450BC), which is, in the words of art historian Kenneth Clark,

In the late Primitive flow a few sculptors like Kritios became known and celebrated, a trend which became fifty-fifty more predominant during the Classical era, as Phidias, Polycleitus, Myron, Scopas, Praxiteles, and Lysippus became legendary. Myron's Discobolos, or "discus thrower," (460-450 BCE) was credited as being the offset piece of work to capture a moment of harmony and balance. Increasingly, artists focused their attention on a mathematical arrangement of proportions that Polycleitus described in his Canon of Polycleitus and emphasized symmetry equally a combination of residuum and rhythm. Polycleitus created Doryphoros (Spear-Bearer) (c.440 BCE) to illustrate his theory that "perfection comes about piddling by little through many numbers."

The more than six-foot-tall <i>Artemison Bronze</i> (c.460 BCE), named for Cape Artemisium where it was found in 1928, is thought to depict either the god Poseidon or Zeus, depending on whether he was originally holding a trident or a thunderbolt.

Most of the original Greek bronzes accept been lost, equally the value of the textile led to their oft being melted downward and reused, particularly in the early on Christian era where they were viewed as pagan idols. A few notable examples have survived, such as the Charioteer of Delphi (478 or 474 BCE), which was found in 1896 in a temple buried in a rockslide. Other works, including the Raice bronzes (460-450 BCE) and the Artemison Bronze (c.460) were retrieved from the sea. The earliest Greek bronzes were sphyrelaton, or hammered sheets, attached together with rivets; withal, by the late Archaic period, around 500 BCE, the Greeks began employing the lost-wax method. To make large-scale sculptures, the works were cast in various pieces and then welded together, with copper inlaid to create the eyes, teeth, lips, fingernails, and nipples to requite the statue a lifelike appearance.

This detail of the Parthenon Marbles shows <i>The Cavalcade</i> (447-433 BCE), a dynamic relief of two warriors on horseback.

Along with sculpture in the round, the Greeks employed relief sculpture to decorate the entablatures of temples with extensive friezes that often depicted mythological and legendary battles and mythological scenes. Created by Phidias, the Parthenon Marbles (c. 447-438 BCE), also known as the Elgin Marbles, are the nigh famous examples. Created on metopes, or panels, the relief sculptures decorated the frieze lining the interior chamber of the temple and, renowned for their realism and dynamic movement, had a noted influence upon later artists, including Auguste Rodin.

Alan LeGuire'due south <i>Athena Parthenos</i> (1990) is a reproduction of the original, based upon descriptions and copies, which is housed in a full-scale replica of the Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee (1897).

The Greeks too made colossal chryselephantine, or ivory and gold statues, beginning in the Archaic period. Phidias was acclaimed for both his Athena Parthenos (447 BCE), a nearly forty foot alpine statue that resided in the Parthenon on the Acropolis, and his Statue of Zeus at Olympia (435 BCE) that was twoscore iii feet tall and considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Both statues used a wooden structure with gold panels and ivory limbs attached in a kind of modular construction. They were not only symbols of the gods but also symbols of Greek wealth and power. Both works were destroyed, simply modest copies of Athena exist, and representations on coins and descriptions in Greek texts survive.

Roman Portraiture

The <i>Capitoline Brutus</i> (c. late four<sup>th</sup> century - early 3<sup>rd</sup> century BCE) is thought to portray Lucius Junius Brutus, a founder of the Roman Republic.

Many Roman sculptures were copies of Greek originals, but their own contribution to Classical sculpture came in the grade of portraiture. Emphasizing a realistic approach, the Romans felt that depicting notable men as they were, warts and all, was a sign of character. In contrast, in Imperial Rome, portraiture turned to idealistic treatments, as emperors, beginning with Augustus, wanted to create a political image, showing them as heirs of both classical Greece and Roman history. As a upshot, a Greco-Roman way developed in sculptural relief every bit seen in the Augustan Ara Pacis (thirteen BCE).

With its realistic detail and compelling individual portraits, this gilded glass medallion (3<sup>rd</sup> century CE), probably of a family in Alexandria, Egypt, exemplified the Roman mastery of the medium.

The Romans too revived a method of Greek glass painting to utilise for portraiture. Most of the images were the size of medallions or roundels cut out of a drinking vessel. Wealthy Romans would take drinking cups made with a golden glass portrait of themselves and, post-obit the owner's death, the portrait would be cut out in a circular shape and cemented into the catacomb walls as a tomb mark.

This mummy portrait (iii<sup>rd</sup> century CE) depicts a young aristocratic woman

Some of the most famous painted Roman portraits are the Fayum mummy portraits, named for the place in Arab republic of egypt where they were found, that covered the faces of the mummified dead. Preserved by Egypt's arid climate, the portraits establish the largest surviving grouping of portrait panel painting from the Classical era. Virtually of the mummy portraits were created between the 1st century BCE and the 3rd century CE and reflect the intertwining of Roman and Egyptian traditions, during the time when Arab republic of egypt was under Rome's rule. Though idealized, the paintings brandish remarkably individualistic and naturalistic characteristics.

Later Developments - After Classical Greek and Roman Art and Architecture

The influence of Classical Art and architecture cannot be overestimated, as it extends to all fine art movements and periods of Western art. While Roman architecture and Greek fine art influenced the Romanesque and Byzantine periods, the influence of Classical Art became dominant in the Italian Renaissance, founded upon a revival of interest in Classical principles, philosophy, and aesthetic ethics. The Parthenon and the Pantheon equally well as the writings of Vitruvius informed the architectural theories and do of Leon Battista Alberti and Palladio and designs into the mod era, including those of Le Corbusier.

Greek sculpture influenced Renaissance artists Michelangelo, Albrecht Dürer, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and the later on Baroque artists, including Bernini. The discoveries at Pompeii informed the aesthetic theories of Johann Joachim Winckelmann in the 18th century and the evolution of Neoclassicism, as seen in Antonio Canova's sculptures. The modern sculptor Auguste Rodin was influenced primarily by the Parthenon Marbles, of which he wrote, they "had...a rejuvenating influence, and those sensations caused me to follow Nature all the more closely in my studies." Artists from the Futurist Umberto Boccioni, the Surrealist Salvador Dalí, and the multifaceted Pablo Picasso, to, subsequently, Yves Klein, Sanford Biggers, and Banksy all cited Greek fine art equally an influence.

Classical Art has also influenced other fine art forms, as both the choreography of Isidore Cunningham and Merce Cunningham were influenced by the Parthenon Marbles, and the first fashion garment featured in the Museum of Modern Fine art in 2003 was Henriette Negrin and Mariano Fortuny y Madrazos' Delphos Gown (1907) a silk dress inspired by the Charioteer Delphi (c. 500 BCE) which had been discovered a decade earlier. The legends, gods, philosophies and art of the Classical era became essential elements of subsequent Western culture and consciousness.

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Source: https://www.theartstory.org/movement/classical-greek-and-roman-art/history-and-concepts/

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