The art of Europe, also known as Western art, encompasses the history of visual art in Europe. European prehistoric art started as mobile Upper Paleolithic rock and cave painting and petroglyph art and was characteristic of the period between the Paleolithic and the Iron Age. Written histories of European art often begin with the Aegean civilizations, dating from the 3rd millennium BC. However a consistent pattern of artistic development within Europe becomes clear only with Ancient Greek art, which was adopted and transformed by Rome and carried; with the Roman Empire, across much of Europe, North Africa and Western Asia.
A vase is an open container. It can be made from a number of materials, such as ceramics, glass, non-rusting metals, such as aluminium, brass, bronze, or stainless steel. Even wood has been used to make vases, either by using tree species that naturally resist rot, such as teak, or by applying a protective coating to conventional wood or plastic. Vases are often decorated, and they are often used to hold cut flowers. Vases come in different sizes to support whatever flower is being held or kept in place.
Pottery, due to its relative durability, comprises a large part of the archaeological record of ancient Greece, and since there is so much of it, it has exerted a disproportionately large influence on our understanding of Greek society. The shards of pots discarded or buried in the 1st millennium BC are still the best guide available to understand the customary life and mind of the ancient Greeks. There were several vessels produced locally for everyday and kitchen use, yet finer pottery from regions such as Attica was imported by other civilizations throughout the Mediterranean, such as the Etruscans in Italy. There were a multitude of specific regional varieties, such as the South Italian ancient Greek pottery.
The art of Ancient Rome, and the territories of its Republic and later Empire, includes architecture, painting, sculpture and mosaic work. Luxury objects in metal-work, gem engraving, ivory carvings, and glass are sometimes considered to be minor forms of Roman art, although they were not considered as such at the time. Sculpture was perhaps considered as the highest form of art by Romans, but figure painting was also highly regarded. A very large body of sculpture has survived from about the 1st century BC onward, though very little from before, but very little painting remains, and probably nothing that a contemporary would have considered to be of the highest quality.
Morgantina is an archaeological site in east central Sicily, southern Italy. It is sixty kilometres from the coast of the Ionian Sea, in the province of Enna. The closest modern town is Aidone, two kilometres southwest of the site. The site consists of a two-kilometre-long ridge running southwest-northeast, known as Serra Orlando, and a neighbouring hill at the northeast called Cittadella. Morgantina was inhabited in several periods. The earliest major settlement was made at Cittadella and lasted from about 1000/900 to about 450 BCE. The other major settlement was located on Serra Orlando, and existed from about 450 BCE to about 50 CE in Magna Graecia. Morgantina has been the subject of archaeological investigation since the early 20th century.
Thermos was an ancient Greek sanctuary, which served as the regular meeting place of the Aetolian League. Its focal point was the temple of Apollo Thermios of about 630 to 610 BC, "one of the earliest developed Doric temples known and a monument of primary importance for our knowledge of the history of Greek architecture". The most famous survivals are the Archaic terracotta metopes decorated with painted scenes from mythology, which are among the earliest examples of this art form in Greece. What is left of these, and other finds from the site, are now in the museum at Thermos, with a selection of the best pieces in National Archaeological Museum, Athens.
Centuripe is a town and comune in the province of Enna. The city is 61 kilometres (38 mi) from Enna in the hill country between the Rivers Dittaìno and Salso.
A fish plate is a Greek pottery vessel used by western, Hellenistic Greeks during the fourth century BC. Although invented in fifth-century BC Athens, most of the corpus of surviving painted fish plates originate in Southern Italy, where fourth-century BC Greek settlers, called "Italiotes," manufactured them.
Hellenistic art is the art of the Hellenistic period generally taken to begin with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and end with the conquest of the Greek world by the Romans, a process well underway by 146 BC, when the Greek mainland was taken, and essentially ending in 30 BC with the conquest of Ptolemaic Egypt following the Battle of Actium. A number of the best-known works of Greek sculpture belong to this period, including Laocoön and His Sons, Venus de Milo, and the Winged Victory of Samothrace. It follows the period of Classical Greek art, while the succeeding Greco-Roman art was very largely a continuation of Hellenistic trends.
White-ground technique is a style of white ancient Greek pottery and the painting in which figures appear on a white background. It developed in the region of Attica, dated to about 500 BC. It was especially associated with vases made for ritual and funerary use, if only because the painted surface was more fragile than in the other main techniques of black-figure and red-figure vase painting. Nevertheless, a wide range of subjects are depicted.
The Amasis Painter was an ancient Greek vase painter who worked in the black-figure technique. He owes his name to the signature of the potter Amasis, who signed twelve works painted by the same hand. At the time of the exhibition, "The Amasis Painter and His World" (1985), 132 vases had been attributed to this artist.
Andokides was an ancient Athenian vase painter, active from approximately 530 to 515 B.C. His work is unsigned and his true name unknown. He was identified as a unique artistic personality through stylistic traits found in common among several paintings. This corpus was then attributed by John D. Beazley to the Andokides Painter, a name derived from the potter Andokides, whose signature appears on several of the vases bearing the painter's work. He is often credited with being the originator of the red-figure vase painting technique. To be sure, he is certainly one of the earliest painters to work in the style. In total, fourteen amphorae and two cups are attributed to his hand. Six of the amphorae are "bilingual", meaning they display both red-figure and black-figure scenes.
The Tanagra figurines were a mold-cast type of Greek terracotta figurines produced from the later fourth century BC, named after the Boeotian town of Tanagra, where many were excavated and which has given its name to the whole class. However, they were produced in many cities. They were coated with a liquid white slip before firing and were sometimes painted afterward in naturalistic tints with watercolors, such as the famous "Dame en Bleu" at the Louvre. They were widely exported around the ancient Greek world. Such figures were made in many other Mediterranean sites, including Alexandria, Tarentum in Magna Graecia, Centuripe in Sicily and Myrina in Mysia.
The pottery of ancient Greece has a long history and the form of Greek vase shapes has had a continuous evolution from Minoan pottery down to the Hellenistic period. As Gisela Richter puts it, the forms of these vases find their "happiest expression" in the 5th and 6th centuries BC, yet it has been possible to date vases thanks to the variation in a form’s shape over time, a fact particularly useful when dating unpainted or plain black-gloss ware.
Etruscan art was produced by the Etruscan civilization in central Italy between the 10th and 1st centuries BC. From around 750 BC it was heavily influenced by Greek art, which was imported by the Etruscans, but always retained distinct characteristics. Particularly strong in this tradition were figurative sculpture in terracotta, wall-painting and metalworking especially in bronze. Jewellery and engraved gems of high quality were produced.
The Polos Painter was a vase painter of the Attic black-figure style. His works date to c. 575 to 565 BC.
Sicilian vase painting was a regional style of South Italian red-figure vase painting fabricated in Magna Graecia. It was one of five South Italian regional styles. The vase painting of Sicily was especially closely connected with the Lucanian and Paestan styles.
The modern scholarly term Hâdra vases describes a group of Hellenistic painted hydriai. Apart from late Panathenaic prize amphorae, it is the only substantial group of figurally or ornamentally painted vases in the Greek world of the 3rd century BC.
Ancient Greek art stands out among that of other ancient cultures for its development of naturalistic but idealized depictions of the human body, in which largely nude male figures were generally the focus of innovation. The rate of stylistic development between about 750 and 300 BC was remarkable by ancient standards, and in surviving works is best seen in sculpture. There were important innovations in painting, which have to be essentially reconstructed due to the lack of original survivals of quality, other than the distinct field of painted pottery.
The mosaics of Delos are a significant body of ancient Greek mosaic art. Most of the surviving mosaics from Delos, Greece, an island in the Cyclades, date to the last half of the 2nd century BC and early 1st century BC, during the Hellenistic period and beginning of the Roman period of Greece. Hellenistic mosaics were no longer produced after roughly 69 BC, due to warfare with the Kingdom of Pontus and the subsequently abrupt decline of the island's population and position as a major trading center. Among Hellenistic Greek archaeological sites, Delos contains one of the highest concentrations of surviving mosaic artworks. Approximately half of all surviving tessellated Greek mosaics from the Hellenistic period come from Delos.
