in the Mediterranean basin, rose to cultural, military and political prominence, but they stood on the shoulders of giants and learned from the traditions of other ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern civilisations. In the sphere of the arts, the Egyptians, in particular, had already developed a culture of idealised, well-proportioned human figures, a narrative tradition in painting and relief sculpture, and temple architecture that incorporated the display of a variety of sculptural elements. Yet the Greeks, in altering the static forms of the Egyptians, sought to craft sculptural figures that expressed life, movement, and a more fundamental and humane sense of moral potential. This development is seen in its early phase in the growing naturalism and subtlety of facial expression in sculpture produced in the Archaic period of the 7th and 6th centuries BCE. Greater freedom of invention appeared during that time in vase painting, but sculptors, restrained by the intractability of stone and by convention, lagged somewhat behind. Reflecting a philosophical search for the ideal, the sculptors aimed at achieving timeless beauty. Just as Greek philosophers considered the nature of the ideal republic, perfect justice or the ideal Good itself, artists brought forth a host of perfected forms. In their subject matter, sculptors often favoured the naked, youthful male body, a reflection of the Greek penchant for athleticism and military prowess, and an indication of the fluid boundaries of their range of sexual appreciation. A widespread and important form was the kouros, a free-standing male figure often placed at tombs in honour of the deceased. Kore, female equivalents of the kouroi, were clothed, following the convention of the time, but equally focused on youth, charm and ideal beauty.
During the 5th century BCE, a mood of great confidence developed among the Athenian people, spawned by their victory over the Persians in 490–479 BCE and by continued Athenian leadership among the collected Greek city-states. Indeed, the Athenian leader Pericles, in his famous oration (431 BCE) for soldiers fallen in the Peloponnesian War, affirmed the superiority of Athens in cultural affairs, stating that their dedication to citizenship, sacrifice and intellect formed the moral core of Athenian greatness. This was a moment of revolution in artistic style. Ever more explicitly based on the ideals of the perfect body, sculptured figures expanded in movement and emotion, but always with a moderating balance of weight, proportion and rhythm. Equally important was the sense of palpable reality; sculpture, rather than being made of unadorned marble or bronze, was often enhanced by details in other media to achieve, in restrained fashion, an extra degree of naturalism. In later eras, a belief in the ‘purity’ of the art of the Greeks led critics to overlook these additions, but the Greeks themselves gave life to their figures by painting key features, such as lips or eyes, onto the marble. In bronze sculpture, the highest and most enduring form of artistic technique, one found such additions as glass eyes and silver eyelashes. Later, Greeks and Greek colonists would make a specialty of coloured terracotta figurines. The realm of ancient Greek sculpture was a lively and, at times, colourful world.
In Classicism, beauty has a numerical component. Just as musical intervals and chords could be defined proportionally through the ratio of numbers, and geometry and mathematics informed planetary movements, similar proportional aspects found a place in Greek sculptural and architectural design. Polykleitos’ Canon, or Spear-bearer, was only the most prominent of many works informed by proportional ideals: the ratios of lengths of fingers, hands, arms, legs and heads were adjusted to stand in relationship to other parts and the whole. We know of his system in part from a description by Galen, a medical doctor who lived in the 2nd century CE. Galen discussed Polykleitos’ artistic system, and seemed to accept the idea that the human body truly comprises a set of ideal proportions. This principle would endure throughout the history of art; Classicism in the Renaissance and neoclassical periods would also incorporate some kind of mathematical or numerical system of proportionality.
The Greek city-states were weakened by warfare during the 4th century BCE. Although striking developments in their sculptural traditions continued unabated, the works of that time were enhanced by a new sense of elegance and spatial play. By the end of the century, faced with powerful opposition, the Greek city-states had lost their independence and were united by the Macedonians under Philip II and Alexander the Great. Greek citizens were incorporated into a far-flung empire that occupied lands from Italy to the edge of India, and even after the division of this empire into various kingdoms, the various Greek city-states remained parts of larger political entities. Such dramatic changes could only lead to a changed perception of one’s place in the universe, and it is hardly surprising that novel artistic developments resulted in all of the visual arts. One new strain was a pragmatic, realistic attitude that seemed to respond to the new realpolitik of changing conditions, in which the ideal of local democracy was shattered. In the new state of things, the individual had to get by in a difficult, changing and dynamic world. The Hellenistic period saw the diffusion of genre scenes, some of which held great pathos: an old woman struggling to walk to market, tired boxers, children tussling, dwarves dancing. New expressionistic details can be found in Hellenistic figures, particularly in the distinctive muscular types, with large muscles, thick proportions, deep-set eyes, and thick, curling, moving hair. The older types of sculptural project – frieze reliefs, tympanum sculpture, and free-standing figures – continued, but new settings and types arose. In the great Altar of Zeus at Pergamon (fig. 206), rather than a narrow frieze set above, there is a large-scale relief scene below, bringing the gigantic battle scene down to the viewer’s own level. The size of public sculpture increased over earlier periods of Greek art, and the Colossus of Rhodes, dominating the harbour, became an early tourist site.
The Greek colonies in the Italian peninsula had set the stage for the advance of the figural arts there. The Etruscans, a still relatively mysterious people, adopted some of the figural modes learned from the Greeks. The spectacular rise of the Romans started out as one of military and political triumph. The story is well known of how a small city-state grew to dominate the peninsula, and then came to create a great empire that stretched from Scotland to North Africa and Mesopotamia. The most striking of the Roman sculptural products during the centuries before the Empire were in portraiture; the unflinching realism of Roman republican portraiture reveals the character and moral fibre of those who were developing a political and social system of great strength and promise.
Iconographic change in sculpture followed the political development and expansion of the Empire. The establishment by Augustus (died 14 CE) of an imperial regime called for a new manner of imperial portraiture, and the changing styles and approach of these images of rulers stand at the core of the development of Roman portraiture. The divine status of the emperor and the propagandistic display of his likeness in public spaces provided opportunities for Roman sculptors and designers of coins and medals. There arose a vast new array of new monument types, and sculpture appeared on triumphal arches, on towering columns, and at the baths, fora, and elsewhere. The Romans were willing, when they were not relying on their own inventions, to erect copies of Greek works, or proudly to display the originals themselves, which had been purchased or plundered from Greece. These Greek copies and originals, in turn, served as artistic inspirations and helped maintain a high standard of quality in Roman sculpture. Some Roman emperors, such as Marcus Aurelius, consciously appropriated Greek ideals; he sported a beard in the Greek fashion and adopted Stoic philosophy, and his sculptors responded with idealising and classicising works, the most memorable being the equestrian monument placed on the Capitoline Hill. This work is in bronze, a favoured material of the Greeks, which also became highly desirable to the Romans.
Roman people of all social classes were surrounded by high-quality sculptural originals, as the Roman state wanted to leave its stamp on public sites, including provincial ones. The baths (terme) were a frequent location for sculptures, many of them free-standing figures on athletic themes. The exterior of the Coliseum was adorned with sculptural figures standing in its open arches and a colossal statue of the Emperor Nero adjacent to the amphitheatre (later turned into a sun god by Nero’s unadmiring successors). The rediscovery of the buried cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the 18th century led to an increase in knowledge of the placement and type of sculptural figures used in Roman cities, and confirmed the literary evidence that much statuary was displayed in the atria of urban homes, as it was in the villas and vast country gardens of the aristocratic classes. Cicero, like other cultured contemporaries, formed what
