GREEK INSPIRATION FOR ROMAN PAINTING

The Romans admired Greek painting as much as they admired Greek sculpture and encouraged the artists they employed to make copies of particularly famous or popular Greek works for them (Figs. 104 and 105). Single figures, groups and entire panel paintings were reproduced, adapted, spoiled or beautified according to the ability of the painters and the demands of the patrons.

While Greek painting has been largely lost, a great deal of Roman painting has survived. Most of what we have comes from the walls of private houses and public buildings in Pompeii and Herculaneum, two provincial but fashionable towns that were buried when Vesuvius erupted in ad 79. A few other paintings have also been found in Rome and elsewhere. It appears that the Romans decorated their walls with mural paintings much more frequently than did the Greeks.

The impression given by this abundant material is generally attractive, occasionally beautiful, but taken as a whole second-rate and derivative.

AN EXAMPLE OF A THOROUGHLY ROMAN PAINTING

Some paintings seem untouched by the pervasive Greek influence. One such is a lively portrayal of a riot in the amphitheatre in Pompeii (Fig. 106). This was a real event: a fight broke out between the Pompeians and visitors from nearby Nocera in ad 59, and the disturbance was so great that the emperor ordered the amphitheatre closed for ten years after the fray.

Time, war and vandalism have all contributed to the destruction of the art of Greece and Rome. Mere fragments have survived, and yet these have often proved inspiration enough for later ages.

Even as early as the Carolingian period (8th-9th centuries), artists and thinkers began to look back to pagan antiquity for models of humanity and culture in art and literature. But it was only in the Renaissance (beginning in the 15th century) that the art of Rome came to be fully appreciated in its own right. From that time on it has been ceaselessly studied, copied, admired and analysed. During the neo-classical period (the 18th century) people became increasingly aware of the differences between Greek art and Roman art instead of lumping them together as ‘classical antiquity’, and this distinction has been further refined as Greek art has come to be increasingly well understood.

The newly emerging urban societies of the Renaissance were immensely impressed by what they learned of the urban societies of antiquity. For centuries the revival of antiquity seemed the highest possible goal for civilised man. Even plaster casts and humble Latin texts were enthusiastically used to open receptive eyes and minds to the glories of the past.

The 21st century has other concerns. The intensity of passion once felt for the art of Greece and Rome has faded, but the beauty and power of the creations themselves remain, mute but eloquent testimony to the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.

THE DECLINE OF THE CLASSICAL POLEIS AND THE RISE OF THE HELLENISTIC KINGDOMS

The Peloponnesian War took a heavy toll. Powerful Athens had been defeated, but mighty Sparta had also been weakened. For a little while in the 4th century bc, Thebes gained ascendancy, but it was limited in time and influence. No force seemed able to unite or subjugate the Greek poleis permanently. By the end of the 1st century bc all this had changed. Dominated first by Macedonia and then by Rome, the poleis were never again to have anything more than nominal independence.

Though the Macedonians were Greek-speaking people, they differed profoundly from the citizens of the Greek poleis. They were ruled by kings and lived more or less on the fringes of Greek civilisation. Philip II, who ruled from about the middle of the 4th century bc, nevertheless appreciated what was best in Greek culture. He enticed to his court one of the most renowned Greek philosophers of the day – Aristotle – to act as tutor for his son and also, perhaps, one of the greatest Greek painters, whose name is lost to us, to decorate the royal tombs (Fig. 82). Philip dreamed of leading the Greeks in an expedition against the Persians to avenge the Persian invasion of the early 5th century bc. Through keen political shrewdness and aptly deployed military might, by 338 bc he had conquered or made allies of all the Greek poleis on the mainland.

Several of the most important tendencies in the development of Hellenistic architecture can be grasped if we look at just three types of buildings: houses, theatres and sanctuaries.

THE HOUSE: NEW LUXURY IN PRIVATE LIFE

During the Hellenistic period, when people lived as part of huge kingdoms governed by remote rulers, they could no longer identify so immediately with their communities and began to feel isolated and alone. Their interest became focused on themselves at a time when emphasis, both emotional and economic, withdrew from the group and shifted on to the individual. People thought increasingly about their private lives and tried to make the intimate world around them more attractive and agreeable. They began to build more elaborate and comfortable houses for themselves; rulers, too, touched by the same sense of isolation, began to build palaces.

Fifth-century bc houses in Athens had been very modest (Fig. 87a). They usually consisted of two storeys and were built of unbaked brick on a low stone base. The entrance was somewhere along one side and led, sometimes rather indirectly, to a central courtyard. The courtyard was a simple affair, a source of light and air for the rooms that opened off it. A blank wall faced on the street, pierced only by small windows whose height above the street ensured privacy.

By the 4th century bc, such humble dwellings had, whenever possible, been improved upon.

HOUSES AND TEMPLES: DWELLINGS FOR MEN AND GODS

The Romans built houses and temples long before they came into contact with the Greeks, and they had strong, old and sanctified traditions as to how these should be constructed.

The traditional Roman house, unlike the Greek house, was built according to a strict and invariable plan (Fig. 114). It was entered through a door placed in the centre of the short side, giving it from the outset a strong sense of central axis that was totally lacking in the more casual Greek houses (Fig. 87 a–c). The entrance (fauces) led into the atrium, a great central space with a rectangular opening in the roof which let in light and air (rain, too, which was collected in a basin, the impluvium, connected to a subterranean cistern). On a direct line with the fauces, on the opposite side of the atrium, was the tablinum, the main room in which the master of the house presided. The rest of the rooms opened off the atrium in an arrangement that was less rigorously prescribed, though always basically symmetrical.

When the Romans encountered the Greeks during the Hellenistic period and fell under the spell of their superior culture, they could not fail to admire the charm and flexibility of Greek houses. They were particularly impressed by the gracious peristyles that were then a feature of the courtyards of many Greek houses (Fig. 87c).

THE GREEKS

The beginnings of Greek civilisation after the decline of the Mycenaeans were not very glorious. By about 1000 bc, people speaking various Greek dialects were living around the Aegean Sea. Principal among them were the Dorians, who lived mostly on mainland Greece, and the Ionians, who populated many of the islands and the west coast of Asia Minor (Map 1). They gathered together in small, widely separated communities, many of which eventually developed into poleis (‘city-states’, as they are often, somewhat imprecisely, called; singular polis).

The earliest communities were poor, illiterate, and isolated from one another as well as from the rest of the world. Slowly they began to prosper and develop. By the middle of the 8th century bc, when the Homeric poems were being composed, craftsmen could already produce huge funerary monuments of pottery covered with precise and elegant decoration (Fig. 59). Soon an increase in population encouraged the now overcrowded Greeks to send out colonies, east to the area around the Black Sea and west to Sicily and southern Italy. The poleis eventually also began to trade more widely and so came into contact with the peoples and the cultures of Egypt and the Near East. These ancient, literate and brilliant civilisations, with their rich and accomplished art forms, awed and astonished the Greeks.

SOURCES OF INFORMATION AND THEIR VALUE

Although we know that many masterpieces were painted in the 4th century bc and the Hellenistic period, hardly anything has survived. In order to get some idea of what painting was like at that time, we have to rely on three sources of information: pictures on pottery, copies of paintings made for the Romans and descriptions by ancient authors. None of these is entirely satisfactory.

Vase painters never copied wall paintings exactly, but they sometimes made use of new ideas about the treatment of space, perspective and the handling of light that are so alien to the technique of vase painting that we can deduce that they must have been inspired by developments in free painting. After the 5th century bc, vase painting became a minor art and could only dimly reflect the great achievements taking place elsewhere. By the end of the 4th century bc, it had virtually died out.

Copies of Greek paintings made for the Romans, though closer to the sources of their inspiration than paintings on pottery, are not as accurate as the more mechanically produced Roman copies of statues. Sometimes, when we can compare several copies of the same original, it becomes obvious that the Roman painters freely adapted and modified their models (Figs. 104 and 105, p. 101).

Descriptions by ancient writers, though often vivid and entertaining, can never bring lost works before our eyes.

THE EMERGENCE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

We have already met the Romans several times in this book. We know they were great admirers of Greek art and ordered copies of sculptures and paintings which, in some cases, give us the only information we have about celebrated Greek originals (Figs. 20, 25, 31 and 32; 72, 74, 75 and 81; 83–86; 104 and 105).

The city of Rome had begun in a small way in the 8th century bc. By the 4th century bc it had already established a republican form of government and begun the inexorable growth that was eventually to make it the centre of a vast empire.

Encounters with the Greeks began in earnest in the 3rd century bc in southern Italy and Sicily, where Greeks had long established colonies. Roman admiration for the Greeks was soon tempered by irritation as rival Hellenistic powers began to call on Rome to assist them in their struggles, for the Hellenistic kings were as frequently at war with one another as the classical poleis had been. The Romans were militarily better organised than the Greeks and politically more efficient. When their patience ran out with the endlessly squabbling Greeks, they began to subjugate the Hellenistic kingdoms one by one. The last to fall was Egypt, conquered by Augustus in 31 bc. At the same time, the republic vanished, leaving only a handful of traditional forms.

PAINTING ON WALLS AND PANELS

The Greeks, like us, thought of painting primarily in terms of paintings on walls and panels. Large paintings on flat surfaces were often used to decorate architecture; metopes, for instance, would sometimes be painted rather than carved in relief. Figure 57 shows a 7th-century bc example. The metope is about a metre square and depicts the hero Perseus, who, having beheaded the fierce Gorgon and put her terrifying head in a bag (the eyes can be seen peering out), runs off to the right. The pin-wheel form of the figure in flight is well conceived to fill the whole surface of the metope in a decorative and lively way. The metope is made of terracotta and painted in shades of black, purplish-red and orange, colours that were suitable for firing. There is no effort to show the figure realistically in space; this is just a fine pattern, recognisable as a running man, arranged to make a handsome decoration.

This is practically the only well-preserved example we have of large-scale painting from this period.

The Greeks also painted on wooden panels. In Figure 58, several women are shown chatting, their delicate profiles outlined in red. Reds and blues are freely used for their clothing. This is an exquisite piece of drawing. It is still very flat, but the overlapping of one figure on top of another suggests the existence of the figures in space. The panel was painted in the later 6th century bc.

Confronting what is left of Greek and Roman art is like entering a hopelessly chaotic museum where most of the exhibits have no labels and such labels as exist have all been thrown helter-skelter into some barely sorted piles. We have the actual remains of works of art – buildings, sculptures, paintings, vases, mosaics and suchlike – but seldom with any information attached to them that indicates when they were made, by whom, or for what purpose.

Fortunately, apart from these physical objects, we have some written sources of information (see Chap. 3, pp.): histories, biographies and inscribed stones. The literary works lack illustrations, and the inscribed stones – often naming the dedicator and the artist – are usually only bases that once supported statues now lost. An important task in trying to understand Greek and Roman art is to attach what has survived in written records to what has survived physically.

A few examples follow of how the history of Greek and Roman art has been built up into a deceptively clear account.

HOW GREEK AND ROMAN WORKS OF ART AND ARCHITECTURE CAN BE DATED

Plutarch, who lived in the 1st and 2nd centuries ad, wrote a biography of the Athenian statesman Pericles in which he mentioned the buildings erected under Pericles' influence. Among them is the Parthenon (Plutarch Life of Pericles 13, 31). Other sources give us dates for Pericles.

Poe's ode is addressed to the legendary beauty who, though married to King Menelaos of Sparta, was carried off by the Trojan prince, Paris. Menelaos thereupon summoned his allies and, having assembled a mighty army under the command of his brother Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, sailed to Troy and fought there for ten years until the city was sacked and Helen was recovered. This is a famous story and one that has often inspired poets, but its connection with the glory of Greece and the grandeur of Rome may not be immediately obvious.

The myth of Helen and the Trojan War seems to have had historical roots in the period around 1250 bc. People speaking an early form of Greek were then already living in Greece and had produced a flourishing civilisation that we call Mycenaean, naming it after the richest and most powerful of its centres. By the end of the 12th century bc, for reasons that are still obscure, this civilisation lay in ruins. Populous sites had become deserted, trade had ceased, skills were lost and crafts declined.