Hellenistic and Graeco-Roman Art

Abstract

Abstract Hellenistic art is an unfashionable field. To the aficionados of the Archaic and Classical periods it seems a bewildering farrago of divergent styles, at one extreme bloated and showy, at the other flaccid and derivative: it is almost as though Greek art, hitherto carried forward in a relatively comprehensible and consistent pattern of development, loses its way and threshes around without a sense of purpose. To the students of Roman art, with its clearer chronological framework and (in the main¬ stream at least) its firm political thrust, the Hellenistic age is the shadowy and half-understood background out of which emerge the technical know-how and many of the stylistic features which go into the making of the Roman state tradition. These attitudes of course do scant justice to the achievements of Hellenistic art. The period 323-31 BC saw the creation of some of the greatest of Greek masterpieces-masterpieces which have exercised considerable influence on the artists and art critics of recent centuries, especially the seventeenth and eighteenth.