The Oxford History of Classical Art

Book excerpt: The art and architecture of Greece and Rome lie at the heart of the classical tradition of the western world and their legacy is so familiar as to have become commonplace. The legacy may appear simple, but the development of classical art in antiquity was complex and remarkably swift. It ran from near abstraction in eighth-century BC Greece, through years of observation and learning from the arts of the non-Greek world to the east and in Egypt, to the brilliance of the classical revolution of the fifth century, which revealed attitudes and styles undreamt of by other cultures. After Alexander the Great this became the art of an empire, readily learned by Rome and further developed according to the Romans' special character and needs until it provided the idiom for the imaging of Christianity. In this book the story of this pageant of the arts over some 1500 years is told by five leading scholars. Their aim has been to demonstrate how the arts served very different societies and patrons - tyrannies, democracies, empires; the roles and objectives of the artists; the way in which the classical style was disseminated far beyond the borders of the Greek and Roman world; but especially the splendour and quality of the arts themselves. And their method is to engage the interest of the reader by a rich succession of illustrations on to which the narrative is woven.