Harry N. Abrams
1969
ISBN: 0810980215
English
272 pages
PDF
An awareness of its uniqueness is indispensable to a proper understanding of Greek art. What took place in the art of Greece between the second millennium b.c.—the legendary age of King Minos of Crete and the Homeric heroes—and the time of Alexander the Great and the Diadochi has no counterpart in any other part of the world or in any other age. This is as true of the achievement itself as of the effects that it produced. One must put aside the notion that Greek art merely followed a natural "evolutionary development," as a plant which grows, forms buds, blossoms, and wilts, or as a man who passes from childhood through youth to maturity and old age. While in nature these sequences repeat themselves constantly, each stage inevitably leading to the next, the phenomenon of Greek art was basically different. Nor can one find in the "happy skies" of Greece the reason for the emergence there of the art that was to become the root of all later European art. But as soon as the idea of the history of Greek art as a predestined, inevitable course of events has been shed, then a historical examination of it becomes interesting and exciting, and the great achievements of the Greek artists become individually recognizable. The historical eye can see how these artists reacted to the stimuli of foreign cultures, how they rejected them, cautiously or enthusiastically accepted them, and how they retained what was basically Greek, varied it, and in the end helped it to re-emerge. Times of relative quiet alternated with times of crisis ; periods in which art was primarily concerned with problems of form alternated with others in which the depiction of spiritual events predominated. Tn order to appreciate the decisive turning points in the history of Greek art, the contemporary observer must attempt to transpose himself back to those times and to judge the innovations in the light of their immediate context. The most significant element may otherwise be all too easily overlooked.
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