3. The Great Awakening

(E.H.Gombrich/The Story of Art)

-Greece, seventh to fifth century BC

-“When Greek artists began to make statues of stone, they started where the Egyptians and Assyrians had left off.[...]The Egyptians had based their art on knowledge. The Greeks began to use their eyes” (65-66)

-“The great revolution of Greek art, the discovery of natural forms and of foreshortening, happened at the time which is altogether the most amazing period of human history.[...]It is the time when science, as we understand the term today, and philosophy first awoke among men, and the theatre first developed” (68)

-“In fact, the very reason why nearly all the famous statues of the ancient world perished was that after the victory of Christianity it was considered a pious duty to smash any statue of the heathen gods. The sculptures in our museums are, for the most part, only secondhand copies made in Roman times for travelers and collectors” (70)

-Though now lost or gone, the statues were decorated with gold and color stones, the marble reliefs painted with strong colors such as red and blue

-The Olympic Games “helped them to perfect their knowledge of the human body in action” and to practice how to represent it (73)

-“The lucidity and beauty of the arrangement, which is no longer geometrical and angular but free and relaxed, [...]the flow of the drapery round the forms of the body, [...]only came into the world with Greek art of the fifth century” (78)