A battle made of stones
Pompeii, 1831. Excavating a large town house, the House of the Faun, archaeologists uncovered a floor that left them speechless. More than a million tiny stones form a battle: Alexander the Great, bareheaded, charges towards the Persian king Darius, who turns round in horror on his chariot. Horses rear, lances jut into the sky.
The Alexander Mosaic was made around 100 BC, probably after a lost Greek painting. It shows what distinguishes ancient art: close observation, movement, space and emotion. Today it is in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, where a major restoration began in 2023, at times in full view of visitors.
Greece: man as the measure
Early Greek sculpture of the Archaic period, in the 7th and 6th centuries BC, shows young men and women in rigid poses, often with an enigmatic “Archaic smile”. In the 5th century BC, the Classical period, the figures come to life. The sculptor Polykleitos developed a canon of ideal proportions, and his Doryphoros brought to perfection the contrapposto already seen around 480 BC in the so-called Kritios Boy: the weight rests on one leg and the body moves into a balanced pose.
Under Pericles, the Parthenon was built on the Athenian Acropolis between 447 and 432 BC, its sculptures created under the direction of Phidias. A large part of the frieze was taken to London by Lord Elgin in the early 19th century. Greece has long demanded its return to the Acropolis Museum in Athens.
Hellenism: drama and pathos
After the conquests of Alexander the Great, Greek culture spread as far as Egypt and India. Hellenistic art became more dynamic and dramatic. The Winged Victory of Samothrace, around 190 BC, seems to alight on a ship’s prow with her garments billowing. On the Pergamon Altar, gods and giants fight in a frieze full of muscle, pain and rage. Since 1930 it has stood in Berlin’s Pergamonmuseum, apart from the years 1945 to 1958, when it had been taken to the Soviet Union. After years of renovation, its hall is due to reopen to the public from 4 June 2027.
Painted gods
For a long time, ancient statues and temples were imagined as gleaming white. In fact they were painted, with eyes, hair, garments and patterns in strong colours. The colours have largely disappeared over the centuries. Since 2003, the exhibition Gods in Color, which originated at Munich’s Glyptothek, has shown coloured reconstructions and has lastingly changed our image of antiquity. The ideal of white marble owes more to Neoclassicism than to antiquity itself.
Rome: copy, portrait and wall painting
The Romans admired Greek art and had it copied in large numbers. Many famous Greek bronzes are known to us only through these Roman marble copies. Rome’s own achievement lay above all in portraiture. Portraits of the late Republic show wrinkles, warts and bald heads; imperial portraits, by contrast, a deliberately shaped ideal. The Augustus of Prima Porta presents the first emperor as a youthful, victorious general, a masterpiece of political imagery.
The walls of the houses in Pompeii and Herculaneum, buried in the eruption of Vesuvius in the year 79, are painted with landscapes, illusionistic architecture and mythological scenes. In Roman Egypt the Fayum mummy portraits were made, lifelike portraits on wood that seem like windows into antiquity. With the Pantheon in Rome, completed around AD 125 under the emperor Hadrian, Roman builders created a dome that remained the largest in the world for more than 1,300 years.
Women artists of antiquity
Hardly any works by ancient painters survive; we know them mainly from texts. In his Natural History, the Roman scholar Pliny the Elder also names women painters, such as Timarete, who painted a Diana at Ephesus, and Iaia of Cyzicus, who worked in Rome, painted mainly portraits of women and commanded higher prices than the renowned portrait painters Sopolis and Dionysius.
Why it still matters
Antiquity is the point of reference to which European art keeps returning: in the Renaissance, in Neoclassicism, in the architecture of museums, parliaments and banks. Concepts such as proportion, contrapposto and the classical orders come from it. And the debates about painted statues and the return of the Parthenon sculptures show that it is far from settled.
Further reading
- Paul Zanker: The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (German original 1987).
- Vinzenz Brinkmann (ed.): Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture of Classical Antiquity (German original 2003).