The document provides an overview of classicism in Greek and Roman art. It discusses how Greek artists in the 5th-4th centuries BCE established ideals of beauty that emphasized symmetry, proportion and the human form. Key Greek sculptors like Polykleitos developed canons of proportion based on the ideal human body. The Greeks also captured perfection in their representations of gods. Roman art emulated and spread these classical ideals throughout their empire.

1. How Art Works:
Week 6
Classicism
Case Studies:
Greek and Roman
Canons

2. Greek Classicism
Greek Civilization
“Man is the measure
of all things.”
Artists studied human beings
intensely, then distilled their
newfound knowledge to
capture in their art works the
essence of humanity

3. Greek Classicism
Greek Art
Greek artists of the fifth and fourth
centuries BCE established a
benchmark for art against which
succeeding generations of artists
and patrons in the Western world
have since measured quality.

4. Beauty

5. The Classical Period in Greek Art
The Greeks would establish an
ideal of beauty that has
endured in the Western world
to this day

6. The Golden Ratio
Doryphoros of
Polykleitos
c. 450-440 BCE
Alexandros of Antioch
Venus de Milo
C 130 and 100 BCE
Leonardo da Vinci
Vitruvian Man
c. 1490

7. Humanism
Apollo Belvedere
In embrace of
humanism, the
Greeks even imagined
that their gods looked
like perfect human
beings

8. Rationalism
Canon of proportions in sculpture

9. Idealism
Maxims carved on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi:
• “Man is the measure of all things.” Seek an ideal based on the human form.
• “Know thyself.” Seek the inner significance of forms
• “Nothing in excess.” Reproduce only essential forms.

10. Greek Classical Sculpture
Kouros: (male) youth

11. "...beauty does not consist in the elements but
in the symmetry of the parts, the proportion of
one finger to another, of all the fingers to the
hand, of the hand to the forearm, of the
forearm to the upper arm, of all the parts to all
others as it is written in the canon of
Polykleitos.“
Galen (2AD)
Doryphoros (Spear Bearer) or Canon. Roman copy
after an original by the Greek sculptor Polykleitos
from c. 450-440 B.C.E.

12. Classical figure in motion
Myron, Diskobolos (Discus Thrower)
Zeus c. 460 BCE

13. Late Classical male sculpture
Praxiteles’ Hermes and the Infant Dionysus Lysippos’ Apoxyomenos (The Scraper)

14. Greek Female Statue Types
Berlin Kore
570-560 BCE
Peplos Kore
c. 530 BCE
Kore, from Chios
c. 520 BCE

15. Sitting and reclining poses
Three Goddesses from east pediment of the Parthenon
438-432 BCE

16. Standing figures
Pheidias’ Athena in cella of Parthenon
Marshalls and Young Women from the frieze of
Parthenon

17. Caryatid from the Porch of the Maidens
Nike Adjusting Her Sandal
c. 427-424 BCE

18. Earliest depictions of fully nude
women in major works of art
• Appearance of the female nude
• She alludes to modesty in her pose
• Increased focus on the individual
Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Knidos c. 350 BCE

19. GREEK ARCHITECTURE
Doric Temple
Parthenon, Acropolis, Athens
448-432 BCE
The word
“architecture”
comes from the
Greek architecton,
which means
“master carpenter.”

20. GREEK ARCHITECTURE
Ionic Temple
Temple of Athena Nike, Acropolis, Athens
c. 427-424 BCE

21. Roman Classicism
Temple of Athena Nike
Classical Greek
Temple of Portunus
Rome, Italy - ca. 75 BCE

22. Polykleitos, Doryphoros,
High Classical Greek
Augustus Primaporta,
Pax Romana (Roman)

23. Roman portraiture
Verism
Head of a Roman Patrician (Head of an Old
Roman)
c. 75-50 BCE
This style is verism, a
documentary realism
(superrealistic)

24. Roman portraiture
Idealism
Augustus of Primaporta
Early 1st century CE (perhaps a copy of a
bronze statue of c. 20 BCE)
Heroic, idealized body
which is derived from the
Doryphoros of Polykleitos
Doryphoros of Polykleitos
c. 450-440 BCE