Why it ends in 480 BCE
The end of a period is rarely a single day, but this one comes close. In 480 BCE the Persian army took Athens and set fire to the sanctuary on the Acropolis. When the Athenians returned, they buried the broken statues and offerings in pits, and built anew. One marble kouros from the Acropolis still shows the damage of a great fire, probably that one. After the final Persian defeat in 479 BCE, Athens became the leading power in Greece, and the art made there from that moment is called Classical: the Kritios Boy, a marble youth carved after 480 BCE, already belongs to the new age.
The beginning is less sharp. Historians conventionally write 700 BCE, but what they mean is the seventh century, when Greek art changed direction. So what changed? Four things above all: the decoration of pots, the way of painting them, the material of temples and the size of statues.
Griffins and lotus flowers from the East
In the eighth century Greek pots were covered with bands of lines and meanders, the style called Geometric art. Then Greek traders settled in stations on the coast of the Levant and in the Nile Delta, and brought back objects and ideas. Within a few generations the bands on Greek pots filled with eastern motifs: palmettes and lotus flowers, animal hunts and composite creatures such as the griffin (part lion, part eagle). Historians call this phase Orientalizing, from the Latin oriens, the east.
Corinth was the great workshop of this style. A Corinthian dinos, a round mixing bowl for wine and water, painted around 630-615 BCE by the artist known as the Polyteleia Painter, is only 18.4 cm high, yet it shows how far things had moved from the Geometric: the bands are still there, now crowded with animals.
Black figures first, red figures later
Corinthian painters also invented a new way of drawing: figures painted as dark silhouettes on the light clay, with details scratched through the paint down to the clay, like a drawing on scraperboard. Athenian workshops learned the technique and pushed it further, until by 550 BCE Athenian black-figure vases dominated the export market across the Mediterranean.
Around 530 BCE, again in Athens, painters reversed the scheme. In red-figure the figures keep the colour of the clay and the background is painted black, so the lines inside a body can be painted with a brush instead of scratched. An amphora by the Berlin Painter (about 490 BCE, 41.5 cm high) shows what the new technique allowed at the very end of the period.
The house of the god moves into stone
The early temples were built of mud brick and wood, with timber columns. In the seventh and sixth centuries the Greek cities of the Asia Minor coast and the nearby islands began competing with one another in huge temples of stone, and the house of the god became a monument. On Samos the architects Rhoikos and Theodoros built a temple of Hera around 570-560 BCE measuring 52.5 by 105 metres: as long as a football pitch, and the earliest in the new Ionic order.
Two styles took shape side by side. The Doric order spread through mainland Greece and the western colonies, the Ionic through the coast of Asia Minor and the Ionian islands. At Corinth, the Temple of Apollo (around 560 BCE), one of the earliest Doric temples on the Greek mainland, still has seven of its columns standing, each carved from a single block of limestone more than 7 metres high.
Temples also needed sculpture, and the pediment, the triangle under the roof at each end, became a stage. On the Acropolis of Athens, an early temple known as the Hekatompedon (about 570 BCE) had a pediment of poros limestone with two lions devouring a bull. Seventy years later, on the Temple of Aphaia at Aegina (about 500-490 BCE), one of the figures in the west pediment is a dying warrior, sinking to the ground.
Statues of youths and maidens
The fourth change is the most visible in museums. In the seventh century Greek sculptors began carving large figures in marble, and for more than a century they repeated two types: the kouros, a naked standing youth, and the kore, a young woman in a long dress, placed on graves or offered in sanctuaries. Their stiffness is a formula, inherited from Egyptian models and loosened little by little. The kouros of Aristodikos, around 500 BCE, closes the series with a body that looks like flesh in the old pose.
Put the four changes together and the period has a clear shape. Greek art arrived at 700 BCE with patterned pots and small bronzes, and left in 480 BCE with stone temples, painted marble statues and vases that told stories in detail. The Classical age started from all four.
Where to see it
In Athens, the Acropolis Museum has the pediments of the Hekatompedon and the korai, and the National Archaeological Museum the great kouroi. The Temple of Apollo stands in the archaeological site of Ancient Corinth, the Heraion in the archaeological site on Samos, and the pediments of Aegina are in the Glyptothek in Munich. In New York, the Metropolitan Museum has the Corinthian dinos and the Berlin Painter’s amphora. Check opening times on the official websites before you go.
Sources
- C. Hemingway and S. Hemingway, “Greek Art in the Archaic Period”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2003); “The Art of Classical Greece (ca. 480-323 B.C.)” (2008); “Architecture in Ancient Greece” (2003).
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection records 1997.36 (dinos) and 56.171.38 (amphora).
- Acropolis Museum, Athens: Hekatompedon pediments (Acr. 3, Acr. 4), kouros Acr. 665, Kritios Boy (Acr. 698).
- Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, Odysseus: Temple of Apollo, Corinth; Temple of Aphaia, Aegina; Aristodikos (NAM 3938).
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Pythagoreion and Heraion of Samos” (595).
