Landscape Paintings of Greece
Monday, November 2, 2009
The roots of Western civilization lie in ancient Greece. For a brief period between 480-439 B.C., called the Golden Age or the Age of Pericles, after the leader who championed democracy and encouraged free thinking, an explosion of creativity resulted. The Greeks invented democracy, logic, ethics, the Olympics, mathematics, laid the foundations of art and philosophy, and developed architecture that we still mimic today.The landscape paintings of the Greeks were architectural. Phidias was the most celebrated sculptor of Greece, and in charge of Pericles’ building projects on the Acropolis, downtown Athens, as well as the Parthenon. Statues changed from being rigid like those of Egypt, to looking more realistically like an athlete, to creating a feeling of balance that suggests motion and sometimes powerful emotions. Also, the statues were not the bleached white marble we associate with Greek sculpture, but were embellished with encaustic, a mixture of powdered pigment and hot wax that was applied to hair, lips, and nails, and sometimes parts of the clothing. The eyes were often inlaid.