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The Greek Miracle
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10465 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1993 |
2,727 Words |
| Author
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Olga Palagia
Olga Palagia, a widely published and internationally renowned
scholar of Greek art, is a professor of art history at the
University of Athens in Greece. |
Although the classical style did not spring up immediately at the inception of democracy after 510 B.C., and had moreover began to emerge before the Greek triumph in the Persian Wars in the first two decades of the following century, it is difficult not to associate it, however indirectly, with historical circumstances. Just as the writing of history gradually emerged in Athens as a science, Greek sculpture was emancipated from the conceptual idiom of the Orient and directed toward a naturalistic representation of the visual world. It is often asked why Greek artists abandoned the archaic tradition in which they had worked successfully for two centuries. The classical moment seems to have developed as a result of mental adjustment from the timeless to the temporal and from the objective to the subjective: as mythology gave way to history, so was formulaic art replaced by the art of illusion. Free of the magical associations of the East and permeated by the individuality of the artists, classical sculpture was based upon perception of changing visual phenomena. Its emergence was based on ceaseless experimentation with ever more lifelike renderings of the human form, which was almost its sole subject.
It is only by comparison with earliest art forms that we begin to understand the impact of the classical. Archaic Greek sculpture (650-480 B.C.), which was a product of visual abstractions operating through a rigid set of proportions adapted from Egyptian and Near Eastern prototypes, is exemplified by the sixth-century kouros from Mount Ptoon. Ruled by the laws of symmetry and frontality, the figure is split in half by a vertical axis running through its spine. As a result, lateral movement is inconceivable. Although designed as a walking figure, its posture is not made visually intelligible since its weight is equally distributed between its legs. Dominated by the frontal plane, the figure appears two-dimensional, with its four cardinal profiles meeting at barely disguised right angles. In archaic relief sculpture too, the juxtaposition of frontal and profile views added up to a whole made up entirely of linear patterns with purely decorative effects.
Classical sculpture retained the geometric principles of earlier periods, underlining rather than dominating the recently discovered naturalistic forms. Although it is not possible to specify a single geographical style, which seems to emerge in several places at once, Athens is clearly dominant. A transitional period of adjustment took place in the first two decades of the fifth century. New tendencies began to blend with traditional elements in the ultimate creations of the archaic period. As these tendencies first appeared in narrative sculpture, it has been suggested
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