The Classic as Realism in Greek Art

Abstract

The classic period of Greek art, roughly dated from the sack of Athens by the Persians in 480 B.C. to the establishment of the Hellenistic monarchies about 300 B.C., has long enjoyed great repute and is often considered the beginning phase of an almost continuous tradition of European art. Yet with respect to actual preserved monuments it remains the least well documented of all periods of Greek art. In 1764 J. J. Winckelmann, in his book on the art of antiquity—the first modern treatise on the subject—admitted that he knew of only two original statues of classical Greek art in the great Italian collections of the day with which he was intimately familiar. Yet in his earlier general treatise of 1755 Winckelmann produced a powerful analysis of the Greek aesthetic of beauty, which may be summed up by his own phrase: “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur.” This assessment was drawn, of course, from his wide reading of ancient writers on art and has fairly close parallels in them, e.g., Dionysos of Halikarnassos de Isocrate 3: “It seems to me that it would not be beside the point if one were to liken the rhetoric of Isocrates to the art of Polykleitos and Pheidias for its holiness, its grandeur, and its dignity.”