Art and Experience in Classical Greece

J.J. Pollitt

(Cambridge 1979)

Preface

'The purpose of this study is to suggest some of the basic cultural experiences which the arts were used to express and to analyze how they were used to express them.'

1. Antecedents and First Principles

i. Order and chaos: Archaic lyric poets express 'profound anxiety provoked by the irrational uncertainty and mutability of life.'  Quest for order and clarity a spiritual ideal, search for a kosmos (order).  The Milesian philosophers sought a primary substance.  Pythagoreans sought order in mathematical abstraction.  Two fundamental forces in Greek thought and expression sought to allay this:  1. the analysis of forms into their component parts; the Geometric stylists chose to stand aside from nature.  2. Representation of the specific in light of the generic; searching for typical and essential forms of phenomena in the same way as Plato.  The archaic smile which characterizes the kuoroi was not so much an emotion as a symbol.

ii. Greeks and Persians: The Classical Period is bounded by two great conflicts with the Orient: the invasion by the Persians in 481/480 BC and the invasion of Persia by Alexander between 333- 323 BC.  The victory over the Persians in 480 BC was the catalyst which transformed the humanism of late Archaic art into the Classical style.  In 500, Sparta was ruled by two kings and an elected board of advisors, Corinth by a mercantile oligarchy, Athens by democracy.  Perhaps the most overriding characteristic of the Greek cities was to merge his life and interests in those of the group. 

The Persian empire (antithetical to Greece) was the most colossal state the East ever had.  Cyrus (559- 527 BC) sought to re-foreg regional Persian states into a new order.  In 546, he defeated Lydia; Babylon, in 539 BC.  His successor Camyses conquered Egypt in 525.  His successor Darius I began to foray into eastern Europe.  The Persian Empire contained greatly disparate cultures and peoples and had a rigidly hierarchical social order.  In 499 BC, the Greeks in Asia Minor revolted from Persia. Athenians and Eretrians joined the Ionians in their revolt and burned the regional capital of Sardis.  Persians crushed the revolt in 494 BC.  Darius sent an expeditionary force into Thrace and Macedon, burned Eretria, but were defeated by Athenians at Marathon.  In 481 BC, Darius' son Xerxes led a massive land and sea campaign against Greece, so it would become a province of the Persian Empire.  The Greeks scored a major victory in the naval battle of Salamis in 480 BC. Xerxes returned to Persia and his force was defeated the next year.  Aeschylus and Herodotus portray the man as the anti- Greek, a man without restraint.   

2 Consciousness and Conscience: The Early Classical Period, c. 480-450 BC

i. The New Range of Expression: Archaic statues show iconic- unchanging 'presences' while the EC explores emotion, temporality and drama: Strangford Apollo (490-85) vs Kritios Boy (480BC); combats of Greeks and Trojans, temple of Aphaia, Aegina west pediment (490) vs east pediment (480 BC); Attic red- figure vases portraying Achilles slaying Penthesileia, Berlin Painter (490) vs Penthesileia Painter (460 BC).

ii. Confidence and Doubt: 'New Self- confidence and new uneasiness' set off by the victory in the Persian Wars created this new analysis of consicousness. Aeschylus portrayed the Persians as doomed by hybris.  The new belief that the world might make sense provided new impetus for study of its changes.  The new uneasiness comes from the idea that men are responsible for their own fortunes.  In 478/477 BC the Athenians formed the Delian League to drive Persians from the north and East Greek lands.  Task accomplished, the Athenians would not let members cities leave the Leauge and gave up the pretense membership was voluntary in 453/454.  In 461, the democratic faction in Athens, under Pericles, engineered the ostracism of Kimon, leader of the aristocratic, pro- Spartan faction, and about the same time broke the power of the court of the Areopagus, an instrument of conservative power.  Growing tension between Athens and Sparta: their clash at Tanagra in 457 on the border of Attica and Boeotia, where Spartans had gone to restore the power of pro-Spartan Thebes in the region. 

iii. Art and Drama:    Victory over Persians brought maturity to Athenian tragic drama.  Sculptors and painters seem to have borrowed technical devices developed in performance to display character and narrative action.  Nowhere is this better shown than Temple of Zeus at Olympia (470- 456); Pollitt compares this to the Oresteia of Aeschylus, which was produced about a year before the pediments were completed.  In the Archaic period, class strife and oriental despotism hung over thought; after 480, Greece, like Orestes, saw itself as escaping from the (familial) curse through reason and law. The temple's east pediment, a frozen moment at start of chariot race between Oinomaos and Pelops, was created in 490; it shows deities uninvolved in human conflict, archaic traits, and the violent action is all off- stage.  In contrast, the west pediment is full of violent action, portraying the battle of Lapiths and Centaurs at the wedding of Peirithoos and Deidameia, a subject chosen to express the triumph of civilization and rationality over barbarism.  Apollo stood in the center as the guardian of religious law and civilized institutions. 

iv. The New Severity:    The EC style is called 'severe' because it has few frills, few ornaments for their own sake, and austerity of expressive intention.  Archaic Athena from the west pediment of Temple of Aphaia vs EC Aspasia type, the austere, controlled, meditative image.  Perhaps the most characteristic trait of the severe style is the moody facial type: heavy jaw, full lips, heavy lids.  Example, 'Blond Boy,' c. 480. Two motivating forces behind the new severity: 1. anti- traditional feeling, which means also anti- Oriental feeling.  Archaic art had been fostered by tyrants on the Eastern model; the aristocratic love of jewel- like detail was abandoned for  unornate but flexible forms.  2. a new  emphasis on personal and group responsibility.

v. Ethos and Pathos:    Greek philosophy recognized two bases for emotion: ethos (character as formed by inheritance, habit and slef- discipline) and pathos (his spontaneous reaction to experiences in the external world).  Polygnotos of Thasos was, according to Pliny, the first painter to explore emotions, opening the mouth, showing teeth and giving a variety of expressions.  His work, which does not survive, seems to have been one of the fomenting forces in EC art.  The twelve metopes of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia depict the Herakles at his labors, at various ages in his life and with varying expressions.  Realistic portraiture had its beginning around the same time. 

vi. Movement and Pictorial Space:    The quest for a wider stage is represented in sculpture by the cultivation of rhythmos.  Perspective (skenographia) was first tried in painting scenery for plays, hence its name.  In the Archaic period, a few schemata had been developed for depicting motion, but these were more like symbols than depictions.  Rhythmos, on the other hand, was a new conception for the representation of movement.  In dancing, momentary stops led to standing for a moment in characteristic positions, called rhythmoi, 'patterns isolated within continual movement.'  The acknowledged master of rhythm was Myron; his famous example, Diskobolos, c. 460.

vii. Archaism and Mannerism:    Since it is an aspect of a varied and shifting environment, perspective is key in EC art.  One symptom of historical perspective is archaism, reviving and playing with earlier styles, such as flowered in Late Hellenistic and Hadriatic art.  Its roots are traceable to 480- 450, and are apparent in the Pan Painter, who employed mannerism common to Attic red- figure around 490.  He probably saw new trends as inimical to vase painting.  Vase painters, however, were freer to indulge their whims than other artists.  Archaism is  a subdivision of mannerism, in which a manner of representation or a certain technical characteristic is repeated or exaggerated to the point of affectation.  Ethos in the EC may have become mannerist itself, sometimes seeming out of context and added automatically.      

3. The World Under Control: The Classical Moment, c. 450- 430 B.C.

In the middle of the 5th century the High Classical moment, confidence won out: unchanging divinity being brought into the world of man and harmonized with it.  There was an anthropocentric drift in philosophy away from the physical world and a preoccupation with human society. 

i. Periclean Art:    Pericles most often held position of a strategos, one of ten generals over military force.  He was a patron of the arts and philosophy and directed his energy to the aim of the glorification of Athens.  He cooperated in the recall of Kimon from exile, and worked out the five year truce in 452/451.  He committed Athens to her imperialism  by signing a peace treaty with the Persians in 449/448, but did not abandon control of the tributary allies.  He financed his building program with Athens' resources and those of the Delian allies.  Prospects for an Athenian land empire vanished with oligarchic coups d'etat on the mainland and the conditions of the thirty years peace treaty of 446/445.  Pericles turns to consolidating the maritime empire, which led to conflicts with Corinth, the only Peloponnesian city with extensive commercial interests overseas, through interference with her colonies, Corcyra and Potidaea.  A council of the Peloponnesians decided upon war and invaded Attica in 431.  His famous Funeral Oration, (Thuc ii, 36-46) captures best the ideals and spirit of Periclean Athens.  In 429, plague struck Athens. 

ii. Man and the Measure of All Things:    Confident belief in human thought and action is most clearly shown in Sophist movement, a group unified by common emphais on ' the importance of human perception and human institutions in interpreting experience and establishing values.'  Most influential was Protagoras of Abdera (c. 480- 410), who said man is the measure of all things, meaning all knowledge is subjective, dependent upon the mind and sense organs of the individual.  Human achievements are of more interest than cosmological abstractions.  With the help of techne (the orderly application of knowledge for the purpose of producing a specific, predetermined product), a golden age was possible.

iii. The Parthenon:    The Persians destroyed two temples to Athena in Athens in 480: Athena Polias and Athena Parthenos (the warrior maiden) which was only partially finished.  The Doric Parthenon was reconstructed from 447- 432 BC, before the Peloponnesian War took its spiritual and economic toll.  Chief architect, Iktinos; general overseer, Pheidias, who made the cult statue of Athena and probably designed the architectural sculptures.  The temple had commensurable n,2n+1 proportions, colonnade 8:17, 4:9 proportion characterized its basic dimensions.  But with subtle, and intentional variations from mathematical regularity in the curvature of supposedly straight lines, inclination away from true verticality.  3 theories to justify this variation: 1. (compensation theory) from Vitruvius, the subtleties are alexamata, 'compensations' or 'betterments' to counteract optical illusion; 2. (exaggeration theory) the curvature of the stylobate meant to make temple appear more immense; 3. (tension theory) the struggle to reconcile reason with perception makes temple seem alive.  3 represents the intellectual spirit of the age: aletheia (reality known by abstraction) is presented as the basis of phantasia (experience as seen by the senses). The Parthenon's fusion of Doric and Ionic forms expresses a quality of Periclean Athens, the Ionic called to mind the luxury, refinement and intellectualism of Ionia, while the Doric associated with the somber simplicity of the Peloponnesos.  External metopes constructed 447- 442, internal frieze, 442- 438. An army of sculptures that eventually developed a common spirit and homogeneous style.  The metopes celebrate triumph of civilization over barbarism: east, gigantomachy; west, Greeks vs Amazons.  The tendency to see the specfici in the light of the generic explains the use of a small number of themes in Greek architectural sculpture.  The frieze shows the (possibly first ) Panathenaean procession, in which a new peplos was given to the cult idol every 4 years.  The Athenians have inserted a picture of themselves into a context normally reserved for the gods.

iv. The Parthenon and the Classic Moment:    Belief in the group, in society raised to the level of an abstraction seems to have been an essential ingredient in the atmosphere of the High Classical period and its art. 

v. Pheidian Style and Spirit:    Pheidias forged the Periclean style and by carrying it abroad, particularly with the Olympian Zeus, made it possible for other Greeks to participate in the Athenian experience, giving an 'Olympian' feeling of the gods, who were emotionally disengaged from but at the same time conscious of the human condition. His work stood between the complete aloofness of Archaic art and deep involvement of the EC era.  The Achilles painter seems to have grown into the Pheidian style, submerging his narrative style. 

vi. Polykleitos: New Versions of Old Formulae:    Non- Athenian Polykleitos of Argos was the foremost proponent of symmetria, commensurability of parts. His idea was new in that this symmetry had a philosophical component as well as a practical function: to express the good or the perfect or the beautiful.  Pythagoras of Samos of the late 6th century, had posited that numbers were the basic constituents of bodies and abstract qualities.  Polykleitos gave expression to an ideal conception of human nature, man in Pythagorean terms.  Most of his work was in making athletic figures on specific commission and seems to have been influenced by the Pheidian style as his career progressed: Doryphoros vs Diadoumenos. 

4. The World Beyond Control: The Later Fifth Century, c. 430- 400 B.C.

i. The Resurgence of the Rational:    In 430, a plague hit Athens  whose symbolic implications were as momentous as the actual loss of life.  Thucydides describes the war like a disease.  Confidence was yielding to Archaic anxiety in an even more extreme form.  In 421, the Peace of Nicias was signed.  415- 413 saw the Sicilian expedition which Thucydides saw as a process of hybris, ate and nemesis.  After their victory Sparta set up a tyranny of oligarchs (The Thirty) in Athens.  The energy that had created the High Classical period was spent.  The psychological upheaval is seen in Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus, produced in 429, which seems bothered by the blindness and inherent arrogance of the 'man is the measure' philosophy.  Later, Euripides anxiety is a despairing recognition of the triumph of the irrational, growing from Medea (431) to Trojan Women (415) to Bacchae (408- 406). 

ii. Refuge in Gesture:    Escapism: from 430- 400 sculptors focused on the wind- blown style  of rendering drapery, developed by the sculptors of the Parthenon.  Most conspicuous example: the Temple of Athena Nike on the Acropolis.  Ornamental beauty became an end all in itself and to a degree had usurped the role of meaning in the specific narrative sense.  Even when there is a specific narrative context to this era's reliefs, their purely decorative character is very marked.  In vase painting, a movement toward feminine refinement, undemandingly pleasant. Similiarly, the development of stylistic analysis in rhetoric.  Gorgias of Leontini (483- 376) doubted men could ever attain real knowledge and turned his attention to becoming persuasive: devices of rhetorical style.  Plato thought that the Sophists thought that they had a magical force with which to bring the world under their control. 

iii. Ancient Cults in New Shrines:    Another of the psychological effects was the shift away from the group- oriented state religion toward cults that involved a personal and emotional relationship with the deity.  The former was epitomized in the Parthenon, the latter perhaps in the 420 BC importation of the cult of Asklepios, the god whose intervention soothed and healed the afflicted.  The emotional and mystical tendencies appearing at this time became the central focus of Hellenistic religion.  The beginnings of this new psychology are found above all in the Temple of Apollo Epikourios (who brings help) at Bassae in Phigaleia, part of Arcadia. In the center of its cella stood a Corinthian column, the first of its kind.  The interior may have been constructed by Athenians during the Peace of Nicias, reflecting the inwardly directed, personal and mysterious psychological disposition of Athens at the time. 

iv. Outside Athens:    Artistic centers seem at have increasingly come under the influence of Athenian style .

5. The World of the Individual: The Fourth Century and its Hellenistic Legacy       

The last phase of Classical Greek Art is from 400- 323, the death of Alexander, distinguished from Hellenistic art (323- 31BC).  From the standpoint of what it expresses, 4th century art has more in common with the Hellenistic era than with the High Classical.  HC apotheosizes the community and its values. Later art reflects the experiences and values of man as an individual.  

i. Personal Experience and the Polis:     The Spartans dominated Greece in 400- 380, and treated the "liberated cities' with even greater harshness than Athens, the cities of Asia Minor were given to Persia and oppressive oligarchies were installed elsewhere.  Athens, Corinth, Argos and Thebes launched an attack against Sparta and were defeated in 394 BC, but Spartan expansion was checked.  In 371, Thebes defeated the Spartans, and began its short day in the sun.  Athens joined again with Sparta against Thebes (369).Then in 338 BC, a Athenian - Theban coalition was defeated by Macedonian Phillip II.  The Greek cities fell into political insignificance in the Hellenistic world.  The 4th century was anything but a decadent era. Aside from the orators the work of intellectuals after the Peloponnesian War shows a detachment from the events of their times.  Of Plato: "His personal experience of worldly politics may have provoked an emotional zeal which reinforced his intellectual conviction that the sensible world was one in which illusion masked reality and opinion passed for knowledge." Neither Plato nor Aristotle were concerned with preparing their pupils in the usual sense.  Cynic Diogenes of Sinope (400- 325 sought autarkeia, "self- sufficiency" and lived like a monk.  The ascetic withdrawal of Epicurus and the Stoic idea of kosmopolites. The New Comedy represented by Menander (free from allusion to current Athenian or other politics)  served as the basis for Latin comedy.    

ii. The Exploration of Personal Experience: Human Emotion:        Now a revival of interest in representing specific human emotions, a tendency begun in the EC, interrupted by the Olympian calm of HC, but with a new focus: pathos, immediate reaction to experience, now receives more attention than ethos.  An early example: sculptures at Temple of Asklepios at Epidauros, c. 390- 380, King Priam from east pediment sack of Troy.  Eirene and Ploutos (Peace and Wealth) by Kephisodotos and Hermes and infant Dionysius by Praxiteles, also his Apollo Sauroktonos.  Expression of personal human tenderness  became institutionalized in vase painting in the 4th century.  

iii. The exploration of Personal Experience: sensuousness and sense perception:        Sensuousness, bordering on erotocism becomes important factor in the 4th century.  No artist played greater role in this than Praxiteles.  His work that had the greatest effect was Aphrodite of Knidos, the goddess's modesty at being found upon coming out of the bath.  The nude female figure becomes one of the most common forms of statuary in the Hellenistic era.  In the 4th century an interest in sense perception itself: skenographia, the use of perspective, and skiagraphia, the use of shading, become widespread and popular.  

iv. The Exploration of Personal Experience: religious emotion:       There is stress on interior innovation in the LC and Hellenistic periods, following the Temple of Apollo at Bassae: the Temples' of Athena Alea at Tegea and Zeus at Nemea use of the interior colonnade.  New temple- like structure, the tholos, comes into vogue, in the first half of the century; these possibly hark back to the Mycenaean tholoi.  The tend toward personal religious thinking can be seen in Asklepios's sculpture, whose bearded images might have been a prototype for the bearded Christ.  The head of Asklepios Blacas would have inclined downward to look at his worshippers.  

v. Idealism and Abstraction:      Toward the end of the 4th century, the emphasis on generic types begin to lose some of its force.  Abstraction appears in an intellectual form, which must owe something to the philosophical climate of the period, at times rather forced compared to the HC period. Classicism has its beginning in the 4th century, with conscious repetition of HC features., its heyday was after 150 BC. 

vi. Lysippos: an end and a beginning:      Wherever changes Hellenistic art significantly varies from 4th century art, these mutations seem connected with Lysippos of Skyon, whose work might have been as early as the 360s; he was court painter of Alexander the Great; and he seems to have produced work in 306.  His work goes through an early traditional phase and a later Hellenistic one.  The traditionalist, he was interested in Polykleitos' symmetria. He seems to have developed a symmetry based on apparent proportions and he reduced the head from 7:1 to 8:1. He breaks out of the spatial cube, intent of foreshortening and the overlapping of parts.  He opened up new categories of Hellenistic sculpture: the 'royal theme,' what the leader envisioned, had done, stood for.  His portraits of Alexander seemed to have tipped the balance more toward personality than role.  His 'personality portrait' became one of the most effective genres of Hellenistic art.  It was increasingly common for a city like Alexandria to be a cultural melting pot, and so an artist could not appeal to a common background of understanding from his viewers.  The scholar type was satisfied by didactic art   Lysippos also used shock tactics in scale: he was responsible for bringing colossal sculpture back in vogue, his Herakles Epitrapezios.  De Visscher arues that after the Peloponnesian War, Herakles came to be seen as the incarnation of courage in adversity.  Lysippos' pupil Chares of Lindos built the famous Helios of Rhodes.           

Epilogue

In Archaic times, there is a tendency to promote the general and ignore the specific as much as possible.  Hellenistic times were the greatest drive toward realism in Greek art.  The HC period falls in between in time and intention, striving to express an ablsolute inherent in and pervading the relative.