Art in ancient Greece

All of these works breathe a loftiness and nobility which lifts us above the transitory and earthbound world of facts. ~ Walter Friedrich Otto

The arts of ancient Greece have exercised an enormous influence on the culture of many countries, particularly in the areas of sculpture and architecture.

Quotes

• Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio.
  • Greece, the captive, made her savage victor captive, and brought the arts into rustic Latium.
  • Horace, Epistles 2.1.156, in Horace : Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica (1929) edited and translated by H. R. Fairclough, p. 408

• It is the historian's job to draw attention to the personal, social, political and indeed moral issues behind the literary and artistic representations of the Greek world. The historian's job is to present pederasty and all, to make sure that … we come face to face with the way the glory that was Greece was part of a world in which many of our own core values find themselves challenged rather than reinforced.
  • Robin Osborne, Greek History (Routledge, 2004), pp. 12 online and 21.

• The worldliness and naturalness with which the religion of the Greeks is reproached is encountered in their plastic art also. Here too the difference from the oriental is immeasurable. Organic structure takes the place of monstrosity; instead of symbolism and denotation we have what we have learned — through the Greeks — to understand as forms of nature. And yet all of these works breathe a loftiness and nobility which lifts us above the transitory and earthbound world of facts. Before our eyes a miracle takes place: the natural has become one with the spiritual and eternal, without surrendering a whit of its abundance, warmth, and immediacy in the amalgam. Should not the spirit for which exact observance of the natural led to the vision of the eternal and infinite have made the religion of the Greeks the very thing it was?
  • Walter Friedrich Otto, The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion, trans. Moses Hadas (London: Thames and Hudson, 1954)