Greek and Roman Painting

Themes > Arts > Painting > Painting before 1300 > Greek and Roman Painting

Euthymides was a contemporary
andrival of Euphronius. Like
Euphronius, Euthymides wanted
to capture the sense of movement.
This vase from c. 500 B.C.E. is
famously inscribed "Euphronius
never did anything like this!"

By the 5th century B.C.E., literary sources mention that vase painting began to take a backseat to monumental Greek painting. Regrettably, not a single large-scale Greek painting from the 5th century B.C.E. or later survives.

Some of these large paintings were reproduced on vases, though. These copies suggest that around the time of the Persian Wars (490-479 B.C.E.), Athenian artists begin to experiment with spatial depth, shading, and color blending to indicate volume and even linear perspective.

None of these achievements, however, was used with complete consistency. Shading was done on an object-by-object basis, rather than by using a single light source for the whole painting. Likewise, instead of a painting as a whole having one vanishing point, each object in a work had its own. But for the first time in prehistory or history, artists moved from a flat, two-dimensional representation of humans and their world to a reasonably accurate, three-dimensional one.

The wooden Pitsa Tablets and a few other surviving fragments of architectural decoration are reminders that painted pottery of this period paralleled contemporary painting on wood. On these wooden remains, artists applied color in flat washes, and human figures are presented in a style similar to those on black-figure vases.

This wooden Pitsa Tablet was painted to
represent a sacrificial procession.This is
a rare surviving example of miniature
painting from the Greek world.

When in Rome...Do as the Greeks Did

The frescoes unearthed at Pompeii
are among the only physical evidence
of Roman painting. This painting of a cityscape gives the illusion of deep
space inside a private home.

Roman frescoes are the closest examples of extant Greek monumental paintings. Ancient authors write that the wealthy men of Rome liked to fill their homes with reproductions of Greek masterpieces. The original paintings were copied freehand and adapted for the Roman home.

The most complete and majestic Roman frescoes are found in the houses at Pompeii and Herculaneum that were buried and preserved under 15 to 20 feet of hot ash and debris when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 C.E. Astounding landscapes, complex vistas of architecture, narrative scenes from mythology, and even still lifes decorate the walls of these cities.

Styles range from great detail and precision to quick, almost impressionistic, brushstrokes. Shading
is used, although the light doesn't come consistently from one direction. Textures are carefully rendered so that a piece of fruit and a glass full of water are clearly distinguishable. In a famous series of scenes from the Odyssey, the colors of the mountains in the background decrease in intensity to indicate that they are farther away — an early attempt at atmospheric perspective.

Art was on the move. By leaps and bounds, the Greeks and Romans began to decipher the mysteries that lie behind painting. Their interest in human movement, however, ultimately proved to be fleeting. By the 4th century C.E., when Christianity became a widespread phenomenon, art ascended from the human world and into the spiritual realm, and artists' focus shifted from the body to the soul.