After the war
The Peloponnesian War between Athens and the league led by Sparta lasted, on and off, from 431 to 404 BCE. Athens came out of it ruined, after a devastating plague, and lost its leading position among the Greek cities. Its art did not decline with it. The elegant, almost calligraphic style of late fifth-century sculpture gave way to a sober grandeur, in freestanding statues and in many grave monuments.
The family grave stele in the Metropolitan Museum, carved around 360 BCE, shows this new gravity. A bearded man sits holding a staff, as Zeus does in Greek art; a woman stands behind him with a small girl. The figures do not look at one another, and the relief leaves open who has died. Restrained as it is, it is full of feeling.
Gods closer to people
The gods changed character too. Around 375-360 BCE the sculptor Kephisodotos made a bronze group for the Agora of Athens: Eirene, Peace, as a young woman holding the infant Ploutos, Wealth, on her arm. Few ancient monuments can be dated so precisely, because the cult of Peace was introduced to Athens in 375/374 and the statue appears on Panathenaic amphorae of 360/359. A goddess holding a child is a tender image, far from the warlike Athena of the Parthenon.
The most famous step was taken by Praxiteles, who was at his height in the 360s BCE. His Aphrodite for the city of Knidos was nude, and it broke one of the most stubborn rules in Greek art, that a female figure was shown clothed. Its slender proportions and its distinctive contrapposto became hallmarks of fourth-century sculpture.
Sculptors on the move
Artists travelled more than before, and taught. The first art schools appeared as institutions; the one at Sikyon in the Peloponnese was among the most famous. Skopas of Paros worked across the eastern Mediterranean, and with Bryaxis, Timotheos and Leochares he carved the sculpture of the Mausoleum at Halikarnassos, each taking one side, a tomb counted among the seven wonders of the world. In architecture, the Corinthian order, with its capitals of leaves, came into fashion.
Lysippos and the new body
Lysippos of Sikyon, at his height around 328-325 BCE and court sculptor to Alexander the Great, changed the proportions of the male body. He made the head smaller and the body slimmer and less bulky, so his statues looked taller, and he paid great attention to the hair and to small details. Pliny reports his famous saying that other artists made men as they were, while he made them as they appeared to be. His bronze of an athlete scraping oil from his arm, the Apoxyomenos, was so loved that when the emperor Tiberius took it from the public baths to his bedroom, the Roman crowd in the theatre shouted until he gave it back.
Almost all of these statues are lost, and we know them through copies. One bronze from the period does survive: a youth found in the Antikythera shipwreck, made around 340-330 BCE and 1.94 metres tall, now in Athens.
The bridge to the Hellenistic world
In the middle of the century Macedonia, under Philip II (360/359-336 BCE), became a great power, and its royal court the leading centre of Greek culture. His son Alexander (336-323 BCE) conquered the Persian empire and reached the Indus in eleven years, and Lysippos’ portraits of him introduced the heroic ruler portrait that his successors adopted. When Alexander died in 323, the Classical period ended and the Hellenistic age began, built on what the fourth century had learned: softer bodies, new proportions, and gods who could look like people.
Where to see it
The Metropolitan Museum in New York has the family stele, the Eirene and Roman copies of fourth-century types; the Antikythera youth is in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens; the Hermes carrying the infant Dionysos, which Pausanias saw in the Heraion at Olympia as a work of Praxiteles, is in the museum at Olympia. Check opening times before you go.
Sources
- C. Hemingway and S. Hemingway, “The Art of Classical Greece (ca. 480-323 B.C.)”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2008).
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection records 11.100.2 and 06.311.
- Pliny the Elder, Natural History 34.51, 34.61-65 and 36.30-31, trans. J. Bostock and H. T. Riley (Perseus Digital Library); Pausanias 5.17.3.
- Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, Odysseus: youth from Antikythera.
