Legacy of Greek Painting
Contribution of Greek Painters to Renaissance and Western Art.
History of Art - Timeline For History of Painting & Sculpture

Legacy of Greek Mural and Panel Painting

There is no genuine distinction between Greek and Roman painting, unless it is relevant that by the end of the first century BCE creative impulses had failed. In the Augustinian period (202 BCE - 96 CE) an academic style was cultivated, which neatly balanced the claims of figures and background, and during the next three hundred years fashion shifted between that and the more full-blooded imitation of earlier Hellenistic painting.

In general, originality was diverted into adaptation or whimsicality. It is not surprising that in the midddle of the first century CE Pliny the Elder described painting as a dying art. By the fourth century CE, technical standards were falling and, while - for two hundred years longer - some respectable work was done in the old tradition (mainly by miniaturists and the illustrators of expensive manuscripts), the hieratic style of Byzantine art was becoming established.

By Greek standards, Byzantine painting is a depraved art - less technically competent, contemptuous of the ideal beauty of figure painting, and ignorant of the rules of optics. And although it developed a mystical theory of its own, there seems always to have been a consciousness of its Greek heritage - evident in the modelling of forms by shading and high lights, in the use of foreshortening, and in the retention of a sort of perspective - so that it was always turning back towards Greek models, dimly preserved in the illustrations of manuscripts.

[Note: For information about ceramics from ancient Greece, including the Geometric, Black-figure, Red-figure and White-ground technique, see: Greek Pottery: History & Styles.]

In Western Europe except for Italy, which kept a connection with the Byzantine world, the barbarian invasions (c.350 CE onwards) more or less obliterated painting. But as it revived, it inevitably borrowed much from the art of Byzantium, then culturally the most sophisticated centre of Christendom. Even so, although Greek painting was the basic ingredient of Medieval painting, both Western and Byzantine, it was not a fertile ingredient. Byzantine painting may have developed, but it did not progress; and the progress of late Medieval painting in the West was due almost entirely to native originality.

The Renaissance began in the fifteenth century in Central Italy, and the casual observation of ancient Greek art, or that of ancient Rome, which had appeared erratically in works of the later Middle Ages, developed into a systematic study by the artists of the time. But the objects of this study, by painters as well as sculptors, were ancient Greek sculptures (statues and reliefs), not pictures.

There is an obvious reason for this. The Renaissance search for antiquities turned up plenty of sculpture, but very little painting, and that generally of a quality both artistically and technically inferior to the standard of Renaissance artists. This study of ancient sculpture remained a basic part of the academic training of painters till the nineteenth century, and continually showed its effects in their figures. But the effects of ancient painting were always negligible. The minor technique of grisaille (a style of monochromatic painting in shades of gray) was imitated from mural decorations found in Rome, some subjects recorded or described by ancient writers were reinterpreted according to the canons of the time, and from the middle of the eighteenth century a few Neo-classicists - for instance Anton Raphael Mengs - produced an occasional pastiche of wall paintings from Herculaneum or Pompeii. But no more. Ancient Greek painting was ill-fated: very little of its achievement has survived and its useful legacy amounted only to a few, though important, technical devices.

• For facts about Celtic history and heritage, see: Irish Art: Visual Arts in Cork

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