The Lost Art of Ancient Greece

Issues of preservation play a major role in the circumstances of object and knowledge survival from antiquity. An object’s material composition is perhaps the most critical factor of its preservation. Paintings on wooden panels are significantly more likely to deteriorate and decay than a marble statue, while objects made of precious but reusable metals (e.g. bronze, gold, silver) are similarly less likely to survive than, say, a terracotta dish. It is not a coincidence that the greatest number of surviving works include pottery, marble sculpture, smaller scale statuettes (often in terracotta), and mosaics. 

Our primary sources on art and artists face similar problems of survival. The oldest manuscripts of ancient art historical writings date to many hundreds of years after the original texts were composed and often represent the selection biases of the groups and individuals who copied and preserved them. Why Herodotus’ work was preserved and not Xenokrates of Sicyon’s, for instance, remains unanswerable but significant for what artists and art we know about. 

These circumstances of preservation have left us with an overall cloudy picture of ancient Greek art wherein some spots of clarity stand out against a murky background. Praxiteles of Athens, for example, presents a brighter though still incomplete spot. We know some details of his life from multiple ancient sources, and that he was one of the most renowned sculptors of the 4th century BCE, but no sculptures that we can attribute without a doubt to Praxiteles’ own hand have survived. Even his most famous statue, the Aphrodite of Knidos, is only known through copies and written descriptions.

If we move into other art categories, the view becomes even cloudier. Painting in ancient Greece was seen as one of the most laudable art forms, with painters ranking among some of the highest regarded and most mentioned art masters. However, not one famous work mentioned in the literary record by any known masters has survived. Apelles of Kos and Zeuxis of Heraclea were both masters of the medium, unmatched for their realism and ability to capture light and shadow, yet all we know of their works comes from written records and ghosts of the originals echoing within later copies. 

Other art forms have the inverse problem; we have ample examples but little to no information on the creators. Paintings on ceramics, for example, were not regarded in the same way as paintings on wood panels, being mentioned nowhere in the primary sources but abundantly represented in the archaeological record. Modern scholarship has identified artistic hands and workshop groupings behind certain collections of painted ceramics, but no named artists. 

John Beazley’s seminal work in identifying the Berlin Painter– among others– is one of the most famous examples of this. Though they never signed any vases they painted, the Berlin Painter’s style and technique was distinct enough to identify over 400 vases and fragments of pottery from the 5th century BCE. Beyond their modern moniker and the work attributed to them, however, we know nothing of this individual. 

Such belated quasi-identification is how we must engage with many ancient Greek artists, and yet, it is still more than what we can say for countless other unknown artistic hands. The famous Alexander Mosaic from Pompeii is thought to be a copy of another famous painter’s work, either Aristides of Thebes or Philoxenus of Eretria, but we know nothing of the artist or artists who made the mosaic itself– a masterpiece in its own right. The same artistic anonymity surrounds the mosaics of Delos, the tomb frescoes at Agios Athanasios, and even the incredibly detailed and lifelike Jockey of Artemision. 

These vase paintings, frescoes, bronze statues, and mosaics are not lacking in skill or aesthetic value compared to the Aphrodite of Knidos or the Discobolus, but they very often remain unattributed and anonymous. 

Now, why is this? For one, what is and is not ‘art’ and how we think about it has changed in many ways since Greek antiquity. Even the language we use to describe and talk about art is fundamentally different from the ancient Greek mind to ours. What art is, who makes it, what it does, and where it goes all differ from our modern (and largely western) preconceptions and what was thought to be deserving of attention, particularly literary attention, spoke to a different set of cultural practices, norms, and ideals than we have today. 

To authors like Pliny the Elder, Apelles’ painting of seafoam in stunningly realistic detail was more worth mentioning than the life-sized bronze statue, the Artemision Zeus/Poseidon. It thus becomes the work of scholars to knit together as many threads as possible in the hopes that even the gaps can contribute to filling in our view of the past.