Two wars and a death
The period is framed by events. The Persian Wars (490-479 BCE) ended with the defeat of the invaders in 479 BCE, a year after they had burned the Acropolis of Athens; art made after that date is called Classical. Athens then led a confederacy of allies, the Delian League, whose members paid ships or money into a treasury on the island of Delos. By 454/453 BCE the treasury had moved to the Athenian Acropolis, and the city had become a wealthy imperial power and the first democracy, in which all adult male citizens voted in the assembly. The period ends in 323 BCE with the death of Alexander, when his successors divided the empire and the Hellenistic age began.
Three phases
Historians divide these 157 years into three phases, each with its own look:
- Severe Style (the first decades after 480 BCE): works such as the Kritios Boy from the Acropolis, one of the first statues to rest its weight on one leg, and the bronze Charioteer of Delphi (478-474 BCE).
- High Classical (the middle and second half of the fifth century): the Parthenon and its sculpture under Pheidias, the proportions of Polykleitos, and the triumph of red-figure vase painting over black-figure.
- Late Classical (the fourth century): after the Peloponnesian War, the Aphrodite of Knidos by Praxiteles, a nude goddess that broke the convention of the draped female figure, and the Corinthian capital coming into fashion.
The middle of the fifth century, the High Classical moment, is the one often called the Golden Age, particularly of Athens.
The rules of Classical art
What changed compared with the Archaic period? Sculptors stopped repeating a fixed standing figure and learned to make a body that seems alive yet permanent. Three rules sum it up. First, weight on one leg, with the chest and the pelvis tilting in opposite directions. Second, proportion: Polykleitos of Argos formulated a system of measures, the Canon, that achieved this effect and allowed others to reproduce it. Third, clarity and harmony, in buildings as much as in statues: in a Greek temple every part is so closely tied to the whole that a fragment of moulding can be used to reconstruct the building.
Painting followed. As red-figure replaced black-figure, vase painters such as Douris, Makron, the Kleophrades Painter and the Berlin Painter drew the human body clothed or naked, at rest or in motion, with new freedom.
War, plague and a softer style
The high point was short. The Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE) set Athens against a league led by Sparta for almost thirty years, and a plague that lasted more than four years devastated the city. Athens lost its primacy, yet its art went on. The elegant, calligraphic style of late fifth-century sculpture gave way to a sober grandeur in statues and grave reliefs, and Praxiteles broke one of the strongest conventions of Greek art with his nude Aphrodite. For the first time artistic schools became institutions of learning, the most famous at Sikyon in the Peloponnese, and sculptors travelled widely: Skopas of Paros worked across the eastern Mediterranean, including on the Mausoleum of Halikarnassos, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
How the period ends
In the mid-fourth century Macedonia, in northern Greece, became the leading power under Philip II (reigned 360/359-336 BCE), and its royal court the leading centre of Greek culture. His son Alexander (reigned 336-323 BCE) conquered the Persian empire, Egypt and Central Asia as far as the Indus valley in eleven years. His court sculptor Lysippos created the heroic ruler portrait, one of many features that point forward to Hellenistic art. When Alexander died in 323 BCE, the Classical period closed. What defines it, in the end, is a balance between life and order that later ages kept calling “classical”.
Where to see it
In Athens: the Parthenon and the other buildings of the Acropolis, the Kritios Boy and the Parthenon sculptures in the Acropolis Museum, and the bronzes and grave reliefs of the National Archaeological Museum. The Charioteer is at Delphi. In New York, the Metropolitan Museum’s Greek galleries cover the whole period, from the Berlin Painter to fourth-century grave stelai. Check opening times before you go.
Sources
- C. Hemingway and S. Hemingway, “The Art of Classical Greece (ca. 480-323 B.C.)” (2008) and C. Hemingway, “Architecture in Ancient Greece” (2003), Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection records 56.171.38, 11.100.2, 25.78.56.
- Acropolis Museum, Athens: Kritios Boy (Acr. 698). Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, Odysseus: Charioteer of Delphi; Parthenon.
