NATURALISM AND IDEALIZATION

The use of modelling lines was no mere trick of the trade. It marks a turning-point in the history of European sculpture comparable with that of foreshortening in two-dimensional art.(see p. 135). A new attitude to the statue, as a visual equivalent and not a reduplication of its subject, had emerged out of attempts to invest marbles and bronzes with the appearance of life. Socrates (d. 399 BC) is reported as saying of statues that 'the quality of seeming alive has the strongest visual appeal'. But shortly before the middle of the fourth century BC his follower Plato (?427~347 BC) condemned further developments towards naturalism, drawing a distinction between 'the art of producing a likeness and the art of producing an appearance', with a reactionary preference for the former. 'Artists nowadays care nothing for truth', he complained; 'they incorporate into their images not proportions that really are beautiful, but those that appear to be so.' In another passage he praised the Egyptians, who did not allow painters and sculptors 'to make innovations or to create forms other than the traditional ones'.

The Nike at Olympia is by Paeonius of Mende, but he does not seem to have been very highly regarded by his contemporaries. It is, however, the only surviving fifth-century BC statue by a named sculptor. The works of the more famous artists are known to us only from descriptions, some of which may have been written towards the end of the fourth century BC, although the form in which we have them dates from the first century AD. It is, to say the least, difficult even to imagine the appearance of Phidias' Athena and his still more celebrated Zeus at Olympia, some 40 feet (12m) high, covered with ivory, gold and colored glass, and incorporating a great deal of ingeniously wrought figurative relief work on the throne

4.33 Discobolus, Imperial Roman copy. Marble, 5ft (1.52m) high.MuseoNazionale Romano, Rome.

and robe. Copies of less famous statues by other fifth- and fourth-century BC sculptors have, however, been identified from descriptions in later literature, notably the earliest extant account of Greek art which Pliny the Elder (d. AD 79) appended to a work on natural history, and a fascinating guide to Greece written by Pausanias in the second century AD (see p. 140). These copies were made between the first century BC and the third century AD, mainly for Roman patrons, whose tastes they must to some extent reflect. Many are marble versions of bronze statues and although some have considerable artistic merit, they probably give little more than a general idea of the originals, in many cases little more than the pose. So they may confuse as much as they illuminate the history of Greek sculpture.

Several Roman versions survive of a lost Discobolus or discus-thrower by Myron of Eleutherae, who is said to have worked in the mid-fifth century BC (4,33). The differences between them indicate how far they all depart from the original, for example in the rendering of muscles and bones, especially the ribs. They reveal, nevertheless, that Myron's statue - in bronze and without the tree-stump that supports the figure and spoils the effect in the marble The Ideal: Idealism, Proportion and the 'Canon'

As an artistic concept, the 'ideal' is based on the belief that sculptors and painters might transcend everyday appearances by idealization, that is by selecting only the best models and eliminating all apparent flaws. A need to create images of physical perfection emerged in fifth-century BC Greece. Artists sought to create human forms that embodied their notion of beauty, sexually and socially conditioned though invested also with moral qualities. It was in this intellectual climate that Plato developed his metaphysical theory of'Ideas' as universals or abstractions existing in a realm of timeless essences, quite distinct from anything that might exemplify them. He argued that all perceptible objects are imperfect copies approximating to imperceptible ideas, ideas that can be apprehended only by reason, and hence all visual images are no more than copies of copies. It followed that the more closely paintings and sculptures imitated visual appearances, the more deceptive and corrupting they were. So all imitative art, including poetry, was banned from his Republic. Nevertheless, Plato's theories allowed the possibility that artists might intuitively see beyond sensory appearances and in this way his concept of the 'ideal' was to have a lasting influence on European aesthetic theory. In practice, however, the more down-to-earth process of idealization as described in Greek and Latin literature was to have a greater effect.

Xenophon recounts that Socrates remarked to the painter Parrhasius, 'When you are painting figures, as it isn't statues standing upright. Myron was famed in antiquity for his naturalism, and there are no fewer than 36 surviving neatly turned Greek epigrams devoted to the unpromising subject of his deceptively lifelike bronze statue of a cow (of which no copy or other record survives).

The composition of the Discobolus is confined to a single plane, as if it had been conceived as a high relief. Polyclitus of Argos, on the other hand, who worked between 452 and 417 BC, took account of multiple viewpoints. His statues are similarly known only from Roman marble copies of varying quality after the bronze originals. The most famous is the Doryphorus or spearbearer, striding slowly forward with his weight almost entirely on his right leg, his left arm holding a spear, his head turned slightly to the right - changes in direction that send a tremor of life through the figure (4,34). This statue is said to have been modelled to illustrate the sculptor's theories about bodily proportions and it became very influential in Roman times when it was called and had the authority of the 'Canon'.

These copies are of interest mainly as records of the poses invented by fifth-century sculptors. They show very little of the subtlety of modelling and amazing naturalism in handling and in the treatment of detail that characterize the very few surviving contemporary bronze statues (none of which can be securely attributed to a named artist). One

dredged from the sea off southern Italy near Riace in 1972 has eyes of bone and glass paste, eyelashes, lips and nipples of copper and bared teeth of silver (4,35). The hair is rendered with the most minute delicacy. And yet, the general effect could hardly be more different from that of in some ways comparable Egyptian figures (2,36). Greek sculptors appreciated that the human figure cannot be simply'reproduced', as if in a cast from a living model: they saw that it must be, as it were, 'translated' not only into marble or bronze but also into the medium of art and the tension held between idealization and naturalism in a delicately balanced equilibrium - those creative life-giving qualities lost in marble copies. The muscular bronze warrior is at once an ideal male figure and a wholly convincing image of a man in the prime of life. Another bronze (found in the sea near Marathon) is of later date and the balance between idealization and naturalism has been tipped towards the former to catch that mood of adolescent dreamy melancholy which first appears in Greek art in the fourth century BC (4,36). It is the product of a world quite different from that of heroic extrovert kouroi, athletes and stalwart warriors.

The sturdiness and air of serene detachment so marked in Classical Greek sculpture began to give way to stylish elegance of form in the mid-fourth century. The sculptor mainly associated with this was Praxiteles (fl. 375-330 BC), of whom very little is known. Classical archeologists disagree as to whether the famous statue of Hermes at Olympia is his original or a very good copy (4,37). Certainly, it has a subtlety of soft modelling conspicuously lacking in the 49 surviving copies of his most famous statue, that of Aphrodite (whom the Romans called Venus) carved for the city of Cnidus on the coast of Asia Minor (4,38). None has more than a hint of the sensual quality ascribed to the original by poets and other writers of the first two centuries AD. They all lauded it as the perfect embodiment of female beauty, supremely and deceptively lifelike. One visitor was so overcome that he leaped on to the plinth (see Glossary) to embrace her.

Surprising as it may seem, in view of the innumerable nude male statues, the Aphrodite of Cnidus is the first completely nude female in ancient Greek sculpture. (Literary sources mention none earlier, and the supposed pre-fourth-century BC origin of two known from Roman copies, in the Louvre and the MuseodeiConservatori in Rome, is by no means certain.) As we have already seen, when the Greeks adopted the Syrian fertility goddess Astarte and renamed her Aphrodite, they immediately clothed her naked form (4,5). The proximity of Cnidus to Syria may partly account for the nudity of the statue carved by Praxiteles, but for no more. For with this figure he virtually created the classic Western image of the beautiful female nude, an image which was to appear again and again in the art of Europe and which also encapsulates some of the fundamental differences between European and other cultures. As in the nude male statues that proliferated in ancient Greece, naturalism and idealism are combined. Moreover, the stance is in effect an adaptation in reverse of that used for statues of young athletes -Aphrodite's weight being on her right leg, with left knee slightly advanced and left foot withdrawn. The only significant modification is in the thighs, held tightly together, and in the general emphasis given to the dimpling roundness and softness of the limbs. Unlike the brazen male nudes, however, she seems slightly shy of her nakedness. Her eyes are averted and the gesture with which Astarte had boldly pointed to her sex has been transformed by a slight shift of the hand into one of protective concealment. By raising the other arm in front of the breasts, in a statue of about 300 BC, an anonymous sculptor effected the most significant change made to the image, creating one of the great prototypes in European art with a long subsequent

history, when it was known as the 'pudic Venus' or Venus of modesty - a figure whose erotic attraction was, of course, enhanced by her modest gesture (4,39).

A conjunction of social and aesthetic concerns may account for the rarity of female nudes in the earlier periods of Greek art, as well as the particular form they took when they eventually appeared in the fourth century. Few civilized societies have been so completely male-dominated as that of ancient Greece. Laws make this abundantly clear: adultery, for example, was defined one-sidedly as intercourse between a married woman and a man who was not her husband, rape as an offence against a woman's husband, father or guardian, not herself. Regarded and guarded as possessions, upper-class wives were kept at home and confined to child-rearing and household maintenance, while their husbands sought emotional, physical and intellectual stimulus elsewhere, either with members of their own sex or among the hetairai or pome (common prostitutes). The latter were depicted naked, in a variety of seductive poses, on sixth-and fifth-century vases, usually in brothel scenes, which are pornographic in the strictest meaning of the word. To have included a nude female among the statues of male athletes which crowded the sanctuaries would therefore have seemed extremely odd.

There can be little doubt that it was the Greek painters of the Classical period who developed both the ideas and the easy to come across one single model

who is beyond criticism in every detail, you combine the best features of every one of a number of models and so convey the appearance of entirely beautiful bodies.' Much later, Cicero (BC 106-44), who must have derived the story from a Greek source, told how the fifth-century painter Zeuxis had employed five different young women as models for a single picture of Helen, 'for he did not believe that it was possible to find in one body all the things he looked for in beauty, for nature has not refined to perfection any single object in all its parts.' The urge to idealize was, nevertheless, held in check by the need for verisimilitude and it is significant that the same two artists should have been celebrated also for their illusionistic skill. According to Pliny the Elder, who had access to Greek sources lost to us, Zeuxis 'painted some grapes with such success that birds flew up to them' and Parrhasius 'depicted a linen curtain with such truth' that Zeuxis asked for it to be drawn aside.

The ideal could not be represented, however, simply by a kind of identikit combination of features, no matter how well selected. Proportional relationships, called by the Greeks symmetria, were of fundamental importance, especially for statues. The fifth-century sculptor Polyclitus wrote a treatise on the subject and to illustrate it made a statue now known only from later copies (434). The treatise or Canon (meaning rule or law in Greek) is lost, but the Roman physician Galen or Claudius Galenus (c. AD 130-20) wrote that according to the Canon the beauty or perfection of a

human figure 'arises not in the commen-surability or symmetria of its constituent elements but in the commensurability of the parts such as that of finger to finger, and of all the fingers to the palm and wrist, and of these to the forearm, and of the forearm to the upper arm, and, in fact of everything to everything else.' To display these relationships a statue was necessarily nude, and in fifth-century Greece, male. It could also have cosmic significance, 'man the measure of all things' in the often quoted words of the Stoic philosopher Protagoras (c. BC 480-410). Polyclitus declared that 'perfection arises from the minute calculation of many numbers' which suggests the influence of sixth-century BC Pythagorean philosophers who developed a theory of cosmic proportions derived from the discovery of the relationship between the measurable lengths of the chords of a lyre and audible harmony.

The idealized statues modelled and carved in ancient Greece, much copied in the Roman empire and rediscovered in fifteenth-century Italy, became part of the western artistic canon - to use the word in a different sense, derived from the canonical books of the Bible and now adopted for an accepted body of supposedly major works of art and literature. They also established a criterion of human beauty that has insidiously conditioned the attitudes of Europeans to themselves and to others, encouraging belief in 'the eternal law that first in beauty should be first in might', as John Keats put it in Hyperion (1818).

copies - must have been an outstanding example of the compositional quality that the Greeks called rhythmos, with the limbs balancing one another in a complex pattern of forms. It is an essay in equilibrium, for the figure is shown not in movement but eternally poised between two actions. According to modern athletes the attitude is not one that would naturally be adopted by a man throwing a discus. Yet

it vividly suggests both the winding and unwinding torsion of the body, as well as the trajectory of the discus. Movement - or rather the idea of movement - has rarely been more effectively expressed in static terms. And the original statue in polished bronze with colored eyes must have looked almost startlingly alive, especially when it was seen in the company of the more usual types of athlete

techniques that were to differentiate the arts of Europe from those of all other civilizations - their predominant naturalism, above all. The painters were, it must be remembered, just as famous in their own day as the sculptors. But whereas we know something about the work of the sculptors, even if only at second- or thirdhand, we know absolutely nothing about the work of the great ancient Greek painters. Descriptions, however, testify to their naturalistic skills in representing spatial recession and movement. Socrates, according to Xenophon, urged artists to go beyond mere representation and express character and emotion at their finest and noblest. Aristotle, writing in the fourth century BC, suggests that already by that date painters had evolved what we could call idealization, caricature and realism ('Polygnotus represented men as better, Pauson represented them as worse, and Dionysius represented them as they are'). How far any of them succeeded cannot, of course, be known since all the works of the great Greek painters whose names are known have vanished. Not a scrap remains of those that hung in a building attached to the Propylaea on the Acropolis at Athens, of the hundreds in other Greek sanctuaries and the many taken to Rome. The painted tomb of c. 470 BC discovered in 1968 at Paestum, Italy, is probably Greek work but provincial and so also are the recently discovered fourth- and third-century BC Macedonian painted tombs at Lefkadia and Vergina, all of which necessarily give only

a partial impression of ancient Greek painting, remarkable though the paintings at Vergina are even in their damaged state (5,7).

Vase Painting

Paintings of the Classical period are known to have been copied in Italy and probably provided models for scenes depicted on the walls of houses at Pompeii (see p. 193). But there is no means of telling how faithful the copyists were or whether their work gives more than a very general impression of the original compositions. The only other visual evidence we have is that provided by the decorations on Greek pottery. These naturally differ from wall and panel paintings in several important respects, notably in scale. But they illustrate the development of those techniques of representation to which the literary sources refer.

Most Greek pottery painting is on useful wares (made for the toilet or for drinking parties, etc.), although some vases were intended for funerary or ceremonial purposes (e.g. for presentation at the Panathenaic games). They were, of course, less highly valued than metal vessels, few of which survive, for, unlike pottery, bronze and silver can be only too easily recycled. Yet great skill and artistry were lavished on them. Basic shapes both elegant and practical had been devised by the sixth century BC for the tall two-handled amphora with swelling body for wine, the three-handled hydria or water jug, the wide-mouthed krater, in whichwine and water are mixed (as was customary), the small jug called an oinoche for pouring the mixture, and the wide, shallow cups, kylix and kantharos, from which it was drunk. The subject-matter of the figurative scenes depicted on them was usually mythological - very similar, in fact, to that of contemporary dramatic poetry and of such large-scale paintings as are recorded. A preference for stories about men and fabulous beasts rather than the immortals on Olympus is evident, although Dionysus, the god of wine, with his female followers the maenads attacked by lascivious satyrs, appears quite frequently. Also depicted are numerous scenes from daily life: artists and craftsmen at work, women engaged in household chores, athletes exercising in the gymnasium, drinking parties and theatrical performances. Love-making both heterosexual and homosexual is represented with extreme candour. Indeed, these vases reflect more clearly than any other surviving works of art the Greeks' preoccupation with their own world, the here and now.

In the sixth century BC figures were usually shown in black on a light orange-red ground. This so-called 'black-figure' process was a Greek invention which called for great technical skill. After a vessel had been formed (on a fast wheel by hand), allowed to dry and then burnished smooth, it was brushed over with a very thin coat of refined and diluted clay known as 'slip' (sometimes misleadingly called a glaze). When dry, it provided the ground on which decorations were painted, also in slip. The chemical properties of the clay used for the slip were such that when the pot was fired, and the heat of the kiln carefully controlled in three stages, the undercoat took on an orange-red color and the decorations a glossy black. Before the beginning of the fifth century BC the reversed 'red-figure' process was introduced as an alternative. The background of the composition was painted in with black slip, which was also used for adding details on the figures 'reserved' on the red undercoat. As the same type of local clay and the same method of firing were used in both processes, some potters 'showed off by painting one side of a vase in black-figure, the other in red-figure. Red-figure gradually replaced black-figure, which, from the early fifth century onwards, was used only for certain traditional types of vessel, notably those filled with oil and awarded to the winners in the Panathenaic games.

Black-figure was essentially an art of silhouette. The details that indicate the modelling of the body are picked out in red lines (or rather are incised through the black slip to the ground color) and make little visual effect. The red-figure process had to be used in order to transform these shadowy forms into light-illuminated figures and this led, in turn, to a departure from the purely conceptual image. On black-figure vases eyes, for instance, had to be shown frontally, even when the head was in profile, as it almost invariably was (the silhouette of a full face being insignificant). Foreshortening appears for the first time on red-figure vases.

It is more than likely that the development of red-figure was inspired by a desire to emulate the effects achieved by

painters working on a large scale and with a much less restricted palette. Red-figure vase painters could delineate figures in a far wider range of postures than before; they could indicate (if not quite express) emotion and character in their features; they could even suggest recession in space. The influence of Polygnotus has been detected in a vase made (and perhaps also painted) by Meidias (4,40). Draperies are agitated, horses turn their heads as they canter along, Hilaeiria, who is carried off in the chariot of Polydeuces, has an expression of almost caricatured despair on her face, some wispy branches of olive hint at a landscape setting. The potentialities of finely drawn lines to suggest form as well as movement have been brilliantly exploited. This vase is, indeed, a virtuoso performance, though one that betrays signs of striving after effects that could be fully realized only on a much larger scale by mural or panel painters.

The achievements of such artists as Parrhasius and Zeuxis may be more faithfully reflected on vessels decorated by a process closer to that of panel painting: the white-ground lekythoi. These relatively small jugs of supremely elegant form were made to hold oil for cleansing the body and many were specifically intended for use in burial rites and subsequent interment with the dead. They were entirely covered with white slip and after firing were decorated in tempera colors (see Glossary), which would soon have rubbed off vessels in frequent use. Indeed, they have all but vanished from most that survive. The figure drawings that remain, however, are no less astonishingly free than they are expressive (4,41). Nothing quite like them is to be found in European art for another 2,000 years. A few bold lines suffice to indicate a limb or a garment, a broad splash a shock of hair, two or three slight brushstrokes give emotional expression to a mouth or an eye. What is even more remarkable is that outline is used not merely to define silhouette, as in black-figure and red-figure vases, but to indicate volume. It is a kind of visual shorthand that can be employed only by an artist who has already solved the problems of graphic representation, and one that can be 'read' only by those familiar with its conventions.

Several of the finest lekythoi - including the one illustrated here - were buried with Athenians who fell in the Peloponnesian War. Few memorials of the dead are simpler or more poignant. Two figures, probably friends or relations, stand on either side of a soldier, who is seated before his tomb with eyes open as if to catch a last lingering look at the 'warm precincts of the cheerful day'. There are no heroic gestures, the mourners strike no attitudes of grief and the soldier seems to confront the inevitability of extinction with a mixture of resolution and regret. Love of life counterbalances the fatalistic outlook summed up in the famous saying 'Call no man happy ere he die, he is at best but fortunate' (attributed by Herodotus to the lawmaker Solon, but also used by Sophocles).

Stelae

Graves were often marked by stone monuments - that is, by stone 'reminders' or 'memorials' - without the religious or magic properties that invested the sepulchral art of most other civilizations. Greek monuments emphasized life rather than death - the memory of the dead in the minds of the living. They were usually upright slabs called stelae carved in relief. Earlier examples rarely had more than one figure, but the type devised in the mid- or late fifth century BC shows two or more framed by a kind of pedimented porch. The relationship between the figures gives these works a sombre dramatic power, all the more effective for being underplayed. A husband takes leave of his wife, tenderly but without any demonstration of emotion; similarly a son says farewell to his aged father, and a father to a son who died in youth. More than one stele shows a pensive seated woman, the subject of the monument, with a standing woman - a slave or daughter - holding a casket (4,42). Repetitions make it clear that these cannot have been portraits (though portraits of distinguished men had begun to appear in Greek art by the early fourth century BC).

Not only the rich were commemorated by such stelae. Several record humble craftsmen with their tools. At least one is of a slave girl, presumably set up by her master or mistress. None has the grandiose pretensions of monuments to rulers such as were then being created on the fringes of the Hellenic world in Asia Minor (e.g. that of Mausolus of Caria, from whom the word 'mausoleum' derives). Fear of the dire consequences of hubris or arrogance may partly account for this. Similarly, they make no reference to an afterlife; they have no 'magic' function. Because of their scale and simple human subject-matter, they are perhaps more directly and immediately appealing than statues and reliefs of divinities behind which there always lurk those irrational beliefs prominent in Greek literature, but which nowadays seem remote and difficult to comprehend.

In the ancient world stelae were not regarded as major works of art. The Romans seem rarely to have robbed them or to have had them copied. Pliny and Pausanias passed them by. Yet, doubtful though it is whether any are by leading sculptors, they sometimes possess in the sensitivity of their carvings the very qualities that are lacking in the copies by which the work of celebrated sculptors is known. The majority, however, seem to have been almost mass-produced. The similarities between some examples are so close as to suggest that they had been roughed out with the help of some kind of pointing apparatus (see Glossary) from a single model: and in them and others we can follow the development of such techniques of working in marble as that of the running drill to cut deep furrows (introduced in the early fourth century BC). Stelae also reflect the main stylistic trends in Greek sculpture from the severity of the early Classical period, in the years immediately after the Persian wars, to the serenity of the mid-fifth century and the more highly worked elegance and greater expressiveness of the fourth. As very few are dated, this stylistic sequence can, of course, provide no more than a rough chronological framework. Some sculptors of the fourth century BC - and vase painters too - may well have harked back to earlier styles in response to those who, like Plato, distrusted change in art as in politics. Tradition played as important a part as innovation in Greek art and, especially, in architecture.

The Late Classical Period

The fourth century BC is often described as a period of artistic decline; it was certainly one of change. New tendencies in architecture are most clearly apparent in two buildings at Epidaurus: the theatre and the tholos, a circular structure of unknown function. Both are in the sanctuary of Asclepius, the god of healing who was also credited with the power of resurrecting the dead and whose cult became very popular in the fourth century. Offerings from many devotees who sought his protection provided the funds for the buildings. The theatre is among the most spectacular of all ancient Greek constructions and one that seems to crystallize an ideal of architecture as pure geometrical form (4,43). It could hardly be simpler - a vast auditorium 387 feet

(118m) in diameter, composed of 55 tiers of marble benches rising round rather more than half the circular orchestra platform or dancing space for the chorus (not for musicians), beyond which there was a long, narrow structure for the stage. The form regularized and embellished the earliest type of theatre, which had been simply a natural hollow in a hill adapted for rituals connected with the cult of Dionysus. It was out of these rituals that drama as we know it evolved. In Athens the theatre where tragedies and comedies were first performed in the fifth century BC had been a fairly simple affair in a cleft of the rock below the Acropolis, with wooden benches in an auditorium hemmed in by buildings on either side. (The extant remains date from a later remodelling.) At Epidaurus space was unlimited in the open country and the theatre could therefore take its 'natural' geometrical shape, which also enabled some 14,000 spectators to see and hear the performers - a feat of acoustics that still amazes audiences today. The theatre was, however, built after the great creative period of Greek drama had come to an end. Whereas in fifth-century Athens only new works had been given - three tragedies (each in three parts) and five comedies each year - now there were revivals of the most popular of those 'classics' from which Aristotle was soon to draw the rules of dramatic poetry. It was not only the architectural form of the theatre but Greek drama itself that had been regularized.

The tholos at Epidaurus is said to have been designed by the same architect as the theatre, Polyclitus (not to be confused with the slightly earlier sculptor of the Doryphorus), but it was strikingly different in style, with much carved decoration. Corinthian capitals, first devised in Athens in the fifth century but little used before the middle of the fourth, are prominent and characterize a new tendency in Greek architecture (4,44). With their curling tendrils and acanthus leaves they were not only more decorative than Ionic capitals but also, since all four faces were alike, avoided the awkward effect which the latter made when seen from the side (as at the angle of a building) but were used almost exclusively inside temples. They perfectly answered new demands for both embellishment and regularization.

Similar tendencies were apparent also in domestic architecture. Demosthenes (b. c. 384 BC), the great orator and leading opponent of Philip II of Macedon (see p. 179), declared that luxurious houses had made their first appearance in Athens in his life-time. There is an interesting signed floor mosaic in a house in Athens, but little else survives. At Olynthos near the coast of Thrace in north-east Greece - a town laid out about 430 BC and destroyed in 348 BC - excavations have revealed that the larger houses already had figurative mosaic pavements in the main room (the andron used for entertaining male guests). A magnificent though slightly later example survives from a house in Pella, some way inland from Olynthos (5,8). Olynthos was built on a regular grid, a type of planning not used in central and southern Greece, except for the rebuilding of the Athenian port of Piraeus (c. 460-445 BC) to the design of Hippodamus of Miletus, who was called in by Pericles. Athens itself was a maze of narrow winding streets and alleys. Its centre of daily life, market-place and meeting place, the agora (literally'field'), remained an irregular space with a simple stoa or long portico to provide shelter from the weather, until order was imposed on it in the second century BC (see p. 189).

Further evidence of a taste for luxury indulged by the ruling classes in northern Greece is provided by gold vases found in a tomb near Philippopolis (present-day Plovdiv in Bulgaria), the capital founded by Philip II of Macedon (4,45). They are of an extraordinarily sophisticated elegance. Figures which had become either tired or overwrought on painted pottery vases in the south here exude a new vigour. Contact with 'barbarians' may have

been responsible. The handles have the same animal vitality as the ibexes that serve the same function on Achaemenid vessels, although here they have been metamorphosed into lively young Greek centaurs.

Some of the finest examples of ancient Greek goldsmiths' work were, in fact, made for the Scythians of southern Russia. No gold ornament of any period or country is more exquisitely wrought than a pectoral intended to be worn on the breast of some nomadic chief and buried with him near the Dnieper river (4,46). Animals are rendered with a vitality and naturalism that makes the griffins of the lower register no less credible than the extremely sharply observed horses, cattle, sheep, dogs, hares and even a couple of grasshoppers. Four men are incorporated, one milking a ewe, another holding an amphora and two in the centre stitching a shirt out of animal skin. The contrast between the simple pastoral way of life represented by these figures and the highly developed technical accomplishment of the goldsmith who made them is not, however, stressed. The Scythians are neither caricatured nor idealized. Not until much later, in Roman times, did these people come to be regarded as 'noble savages', preserving the innocence and moral qualities that 'civilized' man had lost.

Before the end of the Classical period numerous examples of Greek artistry had found their way far beyond the frontiers of the Hellenic world: gold ornaments, bronze vessels, painted pottery vases and, much more widely, coins. The idea of fashioning precious metals into small pieces of uniform size, weight and value originated, like so much else, in Asia Minor. Bean-shaped lumps of electrum stamped with devices were minted in Lydia shortly after the middle of the seventh century BC. But within 100 years the Greeks had regularized the shape to a disc modelled in relief with the emblem of the city that issued it - at Athens, for instance, the head of Athena on the front and the owl sacred to her on the back (4,47)- As their designs were frequently modified and changed, coins provide a miniature history of Greek art from the Archaic to the Hellenistic period. On the earliest, profile heads have frontal eyes and animals are schematized. Later they reflect the naturalistic ideals of the Classical period, none more beautifully than those of Syracuse in Sicily, which bear the firmly modelled head of Arethusa surrounded by dolphins (4,48), and in the later fourth century BC a tendency towards greater delicacy and intricacy becomes apparent (4,49).

The most widely diffused coins were those issued by Philip II of Macedon after 356 BC, when he acquired the gold mines of Mount Pangaeus in Thrace. The gold stater (a piece weighing 8.6 grams) became an item of interna-tional currency and continued to be issued in Macedonia for a long time. It was subsequently imitated by central and northern Europeans ignorant of the significance of its emblematic designs. The process by which such designs stamped with devices were minted in Lydia shortly after the middle of the seventh century BC. But within 100 years the Greeks had regularized the shape to a disc modelled in relief with the emblem of the city that issued it - at Athens, for instance, the head of Athena on the front and the owl sacred to her on the back (4,47)- As their designs were frequently modified and changed, coins provide a miniature history of Greek art from the Archaic to the Hellenistic period. On the earliest, profile heads have frontal eyes and animals are schematized. Later they reflect the naturalistic ideals of the Classical period, none more beautifully than those of Syracuse in Sicily, which bear the firmly modelled head of Arethusa surrounded by dolphins (4,48), and in the later fourth century BC a tendency towards greater delicacy and intricacy becomes apparent (4,49).

The most widely diffused coins were those issued by Philip II of Macedon after 356 BC, when he acquired the gold mines of Mount Pangaeus in Thrace. The gold stater (a piece weighing 8.6 grams) became an item of interna-tional currency and continued to be issued in Macedonia for a long time. It was subsequently imitated by central and northern Europeans ignorant of the significance of its emblematic designs. The process by which such designs

merging into popular housing. Through this area the Panathenaic procession passed before ascending to the Parthenon (see p. 148). On the far southern side of the Acropolis, the theatre with a hemicycle of ranked stone seats was cut into the slope. The main residential area closely packed with inward looking houses of one or two stories lay to the south and west on the site of the Mycenean city. The gymnasium where Socrates and Plato taught was far outside in a grove called Academia.

The earliest known attempt to construct a theory of urban design was made by Hippodamos of Miletus (c. 500-440 BC) who lived in Athens and was a friend of Pericles (see p. 138-40). The town of Miletus (Turkey) destroyed by the Persians in 479 BC is said to have been rebuilt on his plan and he was presumably responsible for the layout of the Athenian port of Piraeus, apparently the earliest example on the Greek mainland of grid planning, sometimes misleadingly termed Hippodamian. But his fame derives less from his practice than his ideas. According to Aristotle he devised an ideal city of 10,000 inhabitants divided into three classes (soldiers, artisans and husbandmen) on a site divided into three areas

(sacred, public and private). He seems to have been the first to appreciate that a town plan might formally embody, clarify and perpetuate a rational social order and his ideas, transmitted to posterity by Aristotle, inspired later projects that combined social engineering with urban design.

His influence has been detected in the remains of Priene (Turkey), a free

city founded c. 350 BC with help from Athens. Within a wall, it was laid out on a sloping site on a strict grid with six level principal streets running east-west crossed by minor streets, some with steps, leading up-hill. The blocks between them were of uniform size, multiples of a standard house plot. Buildings of the types dispersed in Athens were concentrated in the centre: the temple of Athena, stoas on three sides of a rectangular agora, the Bouleuterion, theatre, market and even the gymnasium (4,53). The scheme established here was reproduced widely in the east during the Hellenistic period, as at Dura Europos on the Euphrates founded in 300 BC. In the second century Priene became part of the kingdom of Attalus I under whom the royal and sacred hilltop area of his capital, Pergamum, was built in an entirely different manner for monumental effect (see p. 189). His son Attalus II (!59_138 BC) who had studied philosophy in Athens brought order to the Athenian agora by financing a long two-story stoa closing off the eastern side at a right angle to the south stoa (4,54 as reconstructed under the supervision of American archaeologists in 1950). The Romans were to add a new square agora after their conquest of Greece and final extinction of Athenian democracy. As we have seen, Scythians clearly valued Greek craftsmanship. Many of the finest examples of Greek goldsmiths' work were preserved in the tombs of their kings (4,46). So too were bronze and pottery vessels, including a fifth-century BC amphora, which had originally been made as a prize for a victor in the Panathenaic games. Egyptian artifacts have also been found in these tombs. Fine objects from Achaemenid Persia and Zhou dynasty China were buried with nomads of the eastern steppes and Altai mountains. But the so-called Animal' style developed by the cultures of the steppes differs almost as much from Persian and Chinese art as from ancient Egyptian and Greek. A gold plaque of a stag wrought to decorate an iron shield or breast-plate is a characteristic example (4,51), modelled in relief but with extraordinary feeling for full-bodied form, simplified, schematized and contracted into a tight pattern, yet mysteriously alive with animal vitality.

The origins of the Animal style are obscure. So too are those of the Scythians, who established themselves to the west of the Volga and on the northern shores of the Black Sea in about the eighth century BC, displacing another group of nomads known to the Greeks as Cimmerians (who retreated into Asia Minor and sacked Greek cities on the coast). Excavations have revealed traces of a succession of pre-Scythian cultures in the southern Caucasus - a famous tomb dating from the late second millennium at Maikop and several tombs of the early first millennium have yielded some notable bronzes of animals, but these are closer to the arts of Assyria and Anatolia than to that of the Scythians. A more likely connection would be with the bronzes of Luristan (see p. 114). But the latter include numerous human figures, which are very rare in Scythian art. Also the animals of Luristan often merge into one another by what is known as the 'zoomorphic juncture' -the tail of one creature being fashioned like the head of another of different species - a device which does not seem to have been adopted by Scythian craftsmen until a relatively late period. The arts of the Shang and Zhou China (see pp. 88-91,118-21), at the other end of the steppes, probably contributed to the formation of the Animal style, but here influences seem to have been reciprocal and are, therefore, very hard to disentangle. Works in perishable materials, of which we now know very

little or nothing at all, may also have played a part - not least the tattoos with which the nomads decorated their bodies.

Whatever its origins, the Animal style as we know it seems to have first emerged on the western steppes in the seventh century BC. It is found almost exclusively on small objects, mainly metal - bronze or, quite often, gold enriched with colored glass paste - to be attached to clothing, arms and armour, chariots and the harnesses of horses. The animals from which it takes its name were wild (not those bred by the nomads), usually various species of deer, wolves and large felines although fabulous monsters also appear. Single animals are rendered with a sharp-edged compactness that gives them an almost monumental quality, despite their small size. A stag's antlers are rendered as a series of scrolls running the length of the back; the legs folded together beneath it (4,51). The slim body of a feline, probably a snow-leopard, is coiled into a circle, schematized with ruthless concision but given a tensely flexed muscular vitality. But what do they signify? They can be read in more than one way. Is the stag bound for sacrifice and, therefore, a symbol of man's mastery of the animal world - or was the reverse intended? Is the stag in full flight, escaping capture by its fleetness and superior muscular force, wound up like a hard metal spring?

Another animal, usually identified as a panther, is shown on the prowl (4,53). Its paws are fashioned like curled felines, which are repeated along the tail, a device probably intended to compress the force of many animals within a single image. Similar superimpositions occur on many other pieces, including bronze finials for poles. The significance of the animals themselves remains, none the less, mysterious. Clearly they are more than merely decorative in intent. But their 'meaning' remains obscure, just as their form resists analysis. It is impossible to say more than that the extraordinary contortions and involutions of this art sprang from a culture and sense of form totally distinct from that of the Mediterranean world.

Numerous attempts have, of course, been made to explain or interpret these works of art. They have been associated with the rites of hunting magic, for the nomads are known to have hunted wild beasts as well as bred the tame. They may have represented supernatural beings. Later peoples of the steppes are known to have believed that stags transported the dead to the other world. They have also been explained as totems venerated by the various clans of nomads as ancestors. Their transformation into clan symbols would have followed naturally and easily. The heraldic beasts of medieval chivalry, which include many deer and felines like those on the British royal coat of arms, may certainly be traced back to emblematic devices of later barbarian tribes from central Asia.

Animal style art was essentially aristocratic, intended for the adornment of the person and possessions of the rulers, their families and perhaps some of the more important mounted warriors. (Kingship seems to have been hereditary among the royal Scythians of the west.) The vast majority of examples come from tombs in which the riches and power of the deceased are very clearly displayed. Herodotus described in chilling detail how a dead king was embalmed and taken in a chariot around his dominions, accompanied by an increasing crowd of mourners, to the burial place. There the corpse was placed in a pit together with a selection of royal treasures. One of his wives, his butler, cook, groom, steward and chamberlain were strangled and buried with him, as were a number of horses

which had been clubbed to death. A mound of earth was heaped over the tomb and a year later 50 youths and 50 of the finest horses were killed, stuffed with straw and stationed round it. Several tombs excavated in the Kuban region to the east of the Black Sea have confirmed the substantial accuracy of this account, notably one at Kostromskaya, containing the dead man's armour, a gold plaque of a stag (4,51)., leather quivers, bronze arrow-heads, copper and iron horsebits. Thirteen human skeletons without any adornments lay in the compacted earth above. Outside the main area the remains of 22 horses were found, apparently buried in pairs.

A still more extraordinary group of tombs, rather more elaborate than those of the Scythians and constructed partly of stone, is located far to the east at Pazyryk in the Altai mountains of Mongolia (near the present-day frontier between Russia and China). Here the peculiar climatic conditions preserved their contents deep-frozen in solid ice, allowing us a unique close-up glimpse of the life-style and art of the nomads of the steppes some 2,400 years ago. The body of a king or chieftain has been found, strongly marked with tattooing in the Animal style - a tantalizing indication of the role that decorations on the human skin, now totally lost and unknown to us except for this one chance survival, may well have played in the development of drawing and painting from a very early period (4,56). Also deep-frozen were fabrics with their colors still bright and fresh, including a magnificent Persian pile carpet (the earliest known), delicate Chinese silks and panels of applique work in felt, which were presumably local products. A particularly fine saddle-cover is decorated with dragon masks and fighting griffins and goats, motifs derived respectively from Chinese ritual bronze vessels and the arts of the ancient Near East, but transformed and incorporated into a richly luxuriant version of the Animal style of the steppes (4,57). Such objects as pole-tops made of wood and leather reveal a mastery of complex three-dimensional form: one is fashioned like the head of a plumed griffin holding a deer's head in its jaws, another as a deer with antlers of exaggerated magnificence. That nothing quite like these pieces has been found at the western end of the steppes may well be due simply to climatic conditions less favourable to survival.

There are other related cultures of the steppes, notably that of the Sarmatians, a nomadic people from south Russia who moved into Scythian territory in about the third century BC and then pressed on towards Europe. Sarmatian art reveals contacts with both China and Persia and is notable mainly for metalwork, especially gold and the early development of cloisonneenamelling (see Glossary). The Sarmatians were eventually absorbed into the 'empire' of the Huns from central Asia, whose art forms yet another variant of the Animal style.

Examples of Animal style art may well have reached central and northern Europe long before the mounted nomads from Asia. One of the finest of all, probably dating from the fifth century BC, was found in a hoard of treasure at Vettersfelde in Germany (some 50 miles, 80km, from Berlin); how it got there remains a mystery. This is a relatively large electrum plaque in the form of a fish embossed with a shoal of fish on its belly and animals on its back, with its tail terminating in rams' heads - a good example of the zoomorphic juncture (4,58). An electrum plaque of a stag, of about the same period, in exactly the same pose as the stag from Kostromskaya (4,51), was found in Hungary on the frontier between the nomadic world of the steppes and agrarian Europe. How far work in the

Animal style influenced European art at this time is, however, impossible to determine.

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 1182