Greek Art and Architecture

After Alexander the Great conquered the Greek city-states, his armies carried Greek culture throughout the Middle East. As the Greek cities suffered political and economic decline, state religion and civic pride waned, and a more subjective emphasis appeared in art and religion. Greeks were receptive to a new influx of such Oriental tastes as luxurious decoration and mystic religions. A new Hellenistic mixture of Greek and Eastern styles flourished, especially in the rich cities of Asia Minor and in Alexandria, in Egypt.

The Doric style continued to be used for small temples and for the lower storey of the new, two-storey buildings. Large Ionic temples were built in Asia Minor; an example is the Temple of Apollo at Didyma (c. 300 bc), which had two Ionic colonnades, one inside the other, with 10 columns on the front and back and 21 along each side. Corinthian columns were much more widely used than before, as in the Temple of the Olympian Zeus (begun 174 bc) in Athens, commissioned by the Syrian king Antiochus IV.

New types of buildings, including gymnasia and senate houses, were constructed in the elaborate Hellenistic style, including profuse ornamentation and Corinthian columns. Monumental altars were set up in Syracuse, Pergamum, Priene, and Magnesia. Hellenistic kings built porticoes, libraries, theatres, and monumental gates. Sepulchral monuments imitated the sumptuous style of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. The private house changed from a rectangular hall to a hollow rectangle with a central courtyard with a peristyle, or surrounding range of columns.

With the conquest of the East by Alexander the Great, the insularity of Greek art was challenged by artists who selected as viable themes for their works not only different ethnic types, such as Persians and Indians, but also extreme physical forms, such as those seen in the old, infirm, or grotesque. The dissolution of Alexander's empire resulted in the rise of several rival dynasties; the separate kingdoms that ensued spawned specific schools of art. For example, the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt perpetuated the traditions of the Classical period and its 4th-century bc successors. The Attalids of Pergamum (present-day Bergama, Turkey), an ancient city of Asia Minor, followed the lead of Scopas and others by concentrating on the human body contorted by the violent movements of combat. An illustrious example is the 400-ft-long frieze of the Altar to Zeus—the Pergamum Altar (now in the Pergamum Museum, Berlin)—showing the battle of the Gods and the Giants. This work was erected at Pergamum by King Eumenes II, son of Attalus I Soter, who won noted victories over the Gauls and over the Seleucid king Antiochus III, the Great.

At the same time, sculpture was created that had open forms—that is, forms that tended to carry the viewer's eye beyond the space occupied by the figures—and an emotionally charged style. Famous examples include the Sleeping Satyr (Palazzo Barberini, Rome); the Nike of Samothrace, or Winged Victory, and the Aphrodite of Melos, better known as the Venus de Milo (both in the Louvre, Paris). Additionally, sculpture in the Hellenistic Period relied on experimenting with new compositional devices. One favourite device, called the cross axe, portrays the human form with a twisted torso—that is, the head and limbs point in opposite directions to one another. This device is effectively employed in group compositions, such as Menelaus with the Body of Patroclus (Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence). In these and other works, the sculptors invite the viewer to walk around their compositions. In such a way are discovered, for example, the apples of the Hesperides that Heracles holds behind his back (the Heracles Farnese, National Museum, Naples) and the dual sexuality of the Sleeping Hermaphrodite (Terme Museum, Rome).

Many of these innovations in Greek sculpture appealed to the Romans, who made copies of many works and modified them according to their taste, with the addition of one or more subsidiary figures, as seen in the Laocoön (Museo Pio-Clementino, Vatican City). During Roman times most sculptors were Greeks who continued the Hellenistic tradition in Greece, Asia Minor, Africa, and Italy.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, mainly through Roman copies, the Greek tradition in art was revived and developed in Renaissance Art and Architecture. Realism, a sense of proportion, and Greek architectural and design motifs began to appear in European art. The excavation of Pompeii and other Graeco-Roman sites in the 18th century led to a new revival of the Antique in Western architecture, sculpture, painting, and design which was expressed in the Neo-Classical style of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The term “Classical” came to be applied not only to a certain period in Greek art but to Greek and Roman art in general. By extension, Classic, Classical, and Classicism became terms expressing excellence in any field (see Classical Style).

Academic artists and architects imitated the outward characteristics of Greek art, often without grasping its spirit. In the 20th century, artists reacting against outworn academic traditions came to value Archaic Greek art more highly than that of later periods.