Why is Greek painting missing?
Ancient writers talk about painters the way we talk about Renaissance masters, with names, rivalries and famous works. Yet you cannot see a single one of those works. The reason is the material. The principal medium of Greek painting was the wooden panel (pinax, plural pinakes), whitened with a ground before the painter started. Wood rots, burns and splits, so panels survived only by accident. Walls were painted too, but plaster falls with the wall it covers.
That is why modern books on Greek art are so full of sculpture and vases. Marble and fired clay last; wood does not. Our picture of Greek art is tilted towards the materials that survived, and painting, one of the arts the Greeks celebrated most, is the great absence.
Zeuxis, Parrhasius and the grapes: is the story true?
The most famous tale about Greek painting comes from Pliny the Elder, a Roman writing in the first century CE. Zeuxis, he says, painted grapes so true to life that birds flew down to peck at them. His rival Parrhasius then showed a painted curtain; Zeuxis, proud of the birds’ verdict, asked him to draw it aside and show the picture, and realised his mistake. He conceded defeat: he had fooled birds, Parrhasius had fooled a painter.
Did it happen? We can’t know: Pliny wrote centuries after both painters, and the story has the neat shape of a legend. But it tells us what the Greeks valued. Greek painters of the Classical and early Hellenistic periods developed perspective, the use of light and shade to model form, and trompe-l’oeil realism (French for “deceive the eye”). The anecdote is a dramatised version of those real achievements.
Paintings on public walls
Cities commissioned large painted cycles for public buildings. In the Agora of Athens, the Stoa Poikile, the Painted Portico, took its name from its pictures. When the traveller Pausanias saw it in the second century CE, it still showed the Athenians facing the Spartans at Oenoe, Theseus fighting the Amazons, the Greeks after the fall of Troy and, at the end, the battle of Marathon, with the Persians fleeing into the marsh and towards their ships. Nothing of those paintings remains; we know them from descriptions like his.
Sculpture and architecture were painted too. The Peplos Kore from the Acropolis wore a white peplos decorated with animals, birds and riders on red squares, and her lips and eyes were red. Seen today in bare marble, painted statues are another part of Greek colour that has faded.
A wooden panel from a cave
The oldest Greek panel paintings we have come from a cave near Pitsa, in Corinthia, which was a sanctuary of the Nymphs. Four small wooden panels were found there, painted in tempera (pigments bound with an organic medium such as egg or glue) around 540 BCE. The best known shows a sacrifice: three women, three children and a man, wreathed, approach a lit altar; the first woman carries a basket of sacrificial tools on her head and pours a libation, a child leads the sheep, and two others play the lyre and the flute. An inscription in the Corinthian alphabet names the participants and the painter and dedicates the panel to the Nymphs. It is a modest offering, and yet it is the closest we come to the panel painting the ancient writers praised.
The Tomb of the Diver
In 1968 the archaeologist Mario Napoli found a stone tomb in a small cemetery south of Paestum, in southern Italy, with its inside walls painted in fresco. It dates from the fifth century BCE and is the only tomb with figured frescoes known from a Greek city before the fourth century. On the side slabs men recline at a symposium, the Greek drinking party. On the lid a young man dives from a height into the water.
What does the dive mean? Since its discovery the image has been at the centre of a heated debate. The most common reading sees the dive as the passage from life to death; others see a message for initiates of the mystery cults linked to Orpheus and Dionysos. The image was also, in a sense, invisible: it was painted inside a dark tomb that was closed for ever.
Royal tombs and painted stelae
In the fourth century some of the finest painting that survives comes from the royal tombs of Macedonia. At Aigai, today Vergina, the ancient royal capital, the tombs of Philip II, father of Alexander the Great, and of his grandson Alexander IV were found unlooted in 1977-78. Their wall paintings are among the finest of the late Classical period, and their quality has placed Aigai among the most important archaeological sites in Europe.
After Alexander, Greek painting followed Hellenistic art across the Mediterranean. In 1884 excavators in the Ibrahimiyya necropolis of Alexandria found a large underground tomb, called the Soldiers’ Tomb because many of its dead were foreign mercenaries of the Ptolemaic kingdom. Its burial niches were closed with small painted slabs and stelae of limestone, six of which are now in the Metropolitan Museum. They show how a Greek painter worked: a ground of lead white, an outline incised in it, a preparatory drawing in carbon black, then layers of colour to build up light and shade.
The vases fill the gap
With so few paintings left, painted pottery is our most continuous record of how Greek artists drew bodies, clothes and stories. It is a different art, of course: on a vase the painter worked with a few colours and, in black-figure, with a scratching point. But it is the closest thing to a continuous series of Greek pictures that we have.
So why did so little survive? Because the Greeks painted on wood and plaster, and what remains was saved by a cave, a closed tomb or a sealed niche. Each of these survivors is a lucky accident, and together they hint at an art we can only partly imagine.
Where to see them
The Pitsa panel is in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. The Tomb of the Diver has its own room, named after Mario Napoli, in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale of Paestum. The painted royal tombs are at the archaeological site and museum of Aigai at Vergina, in northern Greece, and the Alexandrian stelae in the Greek and Roman galleries of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Check opening times before you go.
Sources
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Painted Funerary Monuments from Hellenistic Alexandria”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History; “The Symposium in Ancient Greece” (2002); collection record 04.17.1.
- Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, Odysseus: “Panel from Pitsa” (National Archaeological Museum 16464).
- Parchi Archeologici di Paestum e Velia: “L’immagine invisibile. La tomba del tuffatore” (2018); G. Zuchtriegel, La Tomba del Tuffatore (2016); “Museo e Depositi di Paestum”.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Archaeological Site of Aigai (modern name Vergina)” (780).
- Pliny the Elder, Natural History 35.36 (35.65-66); Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.15 (Perseus Digital Library).
- Acropolis Museum, Athens, “Statue of a Kore. The Peplos Kore” (Acr. 679).
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