The Archaic period
(750-500 BC)
About 750
BC there began a period of consolidation of the diverse influences that had been
entering Greek art at a rapid rate over the previous 100 years; it is known as
the Archaic period. It was an age of preoccupation with domestic troubles
brought on by the new prosperity rather than an age of reaching out to other
cultures. It was also the age of the tyrant, whose individual rule was often
supported by arms and by the allegiance of the merchant classes. The courts of these tyrants became the
significant cultural centres, and there was an increase in the demand for art of
all kinds; demonstration of the rulers' wealth and power took the form of temple
building more ambitious than in almost any other period of Greek art, while in
sculpture there was a growing use of expensive and elaborate statuary for
dedication and for marking tombs. In contrast to the previous relation of Greece
to the outside world in art, there developed for the first time a substantial
production of bronzes and pottery for export; sometimes styles or motifs were
even deliberately conceived with the foreign customer in view. During
this period the arts of sculpture, vase painting, and bronze working reached a
level of technical mastery and imaginative freedom that brought narrative action
and even emotion under the command of figural representation. Simultaneously,
out of extensive experimentation with the architectural innovations of the later
7th century, the Classical Doric and Ionic orders were fully established and
largely standardized. In the 6th
century the western Greek colonies claimed a position of importance in the
history of Greek art. The colonies in southern Italy and Sicily had grown as
strong and rich as many cities in the motherland and had made similar
demonstrations of wealth by the dedication of treasuries in the national
sanctuaries and by lavish temple building at home. The temples were generally in
the Doric style, but they often bore Ionic details. In their sculpture and
architecture the colonies were handicapped by the lack of local sources for fine
white marble, and they relied more on painted and stuccoed limestone; the lack
of marble, however, stimulated their production of major sculptural works in
fired clay to a degree not matched at home. The colonial art
centres seem to have been Syracuse, Selinus, and Acragas in Sicily and
Poseidonia, or Paestum, Sybaris, and Tarentum in Italy. Although the Greek
colonies seem to have attracted artists from the homeland, all their art tends
to a largeness of scale and of detail that often contrasts with popular notions
of Greek monumental art. For example, the most striking ancient building on
Sicily is the colossal Doric temple of Olympian Zeus at Acragas, begun in about
500 BC and left unfinished a century later. To carry the weight of the massive
entablature, the outer columns were not freestanding but were half-columns engaged against (that
is, partially attached to) a continuous solid wall. An earlier Sicilian variant
of this use of the plastically molded wall mass with the orders applied
decoratively can be seen in the columnar curtain walls of Temple F at Selinus,
begun about 560 BC. The engaged columns of Acragas were echoed in the late 5th
century by the architect Ictinus in the cella of the Temple of Apollo at Bassae
and half a century later by the sculptor Scopas in the Temple of Athena at
Tegea. All these buildings suggest that the 18th-century Enlightenment idea of
Greek architecture as a system based solely on post-and-lintel
construction, in which the columns carried the load, was erroneous. Because
temples constructed entirely of stone were expensive, they were not replaced
without a compelling reason; in many central and southern Greek cities,
therefore, the robust Archaic forms of the Doric temples dominated the townscape
through the Classical and later periods. The forms were heavy, with plump
columns and capitals and brightly coloured upperworks.
Although little change was made in the basic order in the 6th century, there was
a gradual refinement of detail and proportion approaching the Classical form of
the order. At this time also the place of sculpture in Doric architecture was
once and for all established. The
more exotic Ionic order of eastern Greece was slower to determine its forms; the
order developed through the so-called Aeolic capital with vertically springing
volutes, or spiral ornaments, to the familiar Ionic
capital, the volutes of which spread horizontally from the centre and
curl downward. There were also several distinctive local methods of treating
bases or entire plans. The order was always fussier and more ornate, less
stereotyped than Doric, yet it was still limited to monumental plans, and the
Ionic temples of the 6th century exceed in size and decoration even the most
ambitious of their Classical successors. Such were the temples of Artemis at
Ephesus in Asia Minor and the successive temples of Hera on the island of Samos,
all of which were more than 300 feet long and set with forests of more than 100
columns standing in double and triple rows around the central rectangular room
(cella), where the cult image stood. At the same time, masons developed and
refined the carved cyma (double curve) and ovolo (convex curve)
moldings, which are
two profiles that have remained part of the grammar of Western architectural
ornament to the present day.