Four periods, four sets of dates
The usual division is this: Geometric (about 900-700 BCE), Archaic (700-480), Classical (480-323) and Hellenistic (323-31). The dates are conventions, like the chapter breaks in a long book, and two of them mark real events: 480 BCE, when the Persians burned the Acropolis of Athens, and 323 BCE, the death of Alexander the Great. The last one, 31 BCE, is the Battle of Actium, the conventional end of the Hellenistic age; some books write 30.
Why bother with periods at all? Because the period tells you what to expect from a work before you read its label: the material, the subjects, the way a body stands.
Geometric: pots wrapped in patterns (c. 900-700 BCE)
In the Geometric period the art that survives is mostly pottery and small bronzes. Painters covered vases with horizontal bands of lines and meanders, and in the middle of the eighth century, in Athens, they began to set human figures in them. The first scenes are funerals. A krater in the Metropolitan Museum (about 750-735 BCE), 108.3 cm high, shows a dead man on his bier among his family and the mourners, all drawn with the same geometry as the ornament. There is no large stone sculpture yet.
Archaic: marble youths and black figures (c. 700-480 BCE)
In the seventh century contacts with the Near East and Egypt changed everything. Eastern animals and plants filled the bands on the pots, temples were rebuilt in stone, and sculptors began carving life-size figures in marble. The New York Kouros (about 590-580 BCE), a naked youth 194.6 cm tall in marble from Naxos, still follows Egyptian rules in its pose and proportions.
Painting changed too. Corinthian potters invented figures in dark silhouette, and by 550 BCE Athenian black-figure vases dominated the export market of the Mediterranean; around 530 BCE Athens reversed the scheme with red-figure, light figures on a black ground. The whole Archaic period works like a long apprenticeship: by its end the sculptors know how a body stands, and the painters know how it moves.
Classical: balance and the Parthenon (c. 480-323 BCE)
After the defeat of the Persians in 479 BCE, Athens dominated Greece politically, economically and culturally, and the wealth it gathered paid for Perikles’ building programme on the Acropolis. The Parthenon (447-438 BCE) is its centrepiece, a Doric temple whose platform and stylobate curve slightly upwards in the middle.
The Classical period is when Greek statues learn to relax. Already in the Kritios Boy, made after 480 BCE, the weight rests on one leg. Bronze became the favourite material for freestanding statues, but very few bronze originals of the fifth century survive. What we know of the famous ones comes mainly from ancient writers and from later Roman copies in marble. Grave reliefs show the same calm: a marble stele in the Met (about 360 BCE, 171.1 cm high) gathers a whole family on one slab of Pentelic marble.
Hellenistic: drama for a wider world (c. 323-31 BCE)
Alexander the Great died in 323 BCE, leaving an empire that stretched from Greece and Asia Minor through Egypt and the old Persian empire to India. Greek art followed Greek rulers and cities across that whole space. Hellenistic art widens its cast: children, old people and grotesque figures appear next to gods and heroes, and bodies twist and suffer.
Two works sum up the period. The Nike of Samothrace (about 200-175 BCE), a winged Victory 328 cm tall, lands on the prow of a ship carved in stone, as if the wind were still blowing. The Laocoön group, the Trojan priest and his sons strangled by serpents, was found in Rome in 1506; the Vatican Museums date it to the late first century BCE (about 40-20 BCE), though the date is still debated. Either way, it shows the Hellenistic style at the moment it was passing into Roman hands.
How to tell them apart
So, faced with an unlabelled Greek work, what do you check first? If it is a pot covered in bands of lines, with stick-like figures at most, think Geometric. If it is a stiff figure standing straight with a faint smile, or a vase painted in black silhouettes, think Archaic. If the body rests its weight on one leg and the face is calm, think Classical. And if the figure twists, suffers or belongs to someone ordinary, a child or an old woman, think Hellenistic. It won’t date a work to the decade, but it puts it in the right century.
Where to see it
Athens holds the four periods in one city: the National Archaeological Museum goes from Geometric vases to the great bronzes, and the Acropolis Museum has the Archaic korai and the Parthenon sculptures. The Nike of Samothrace is in the Louvre, the Laocoön in the Vatican Museums, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York has a strong collection from all four periods. Check opening times before you go.
Sources
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: chronology of Ancient Greece; “Greek Art in the Archaic Period” (2003); “The Art of Classical Greece (ca. 480-323 B.C.)” (2008); “Art of the Hellenistic Age and the Hellenistic Tradition”.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection records 14.130.14, 32.11.1, 11.100.2.
- Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, Odysseus: Parthenon. Acropolis Restoration Service (YSMA): Parthenon. Acropolis Museum: Kritios Boy (Acr. 698).
- Musée du Louvre, collection record Ma 2369, “Victoire de Samothrace”.
- Musei Vaticani, “Laocoonte”, Museo Pio-Clementino, and catalogue record MV.1059.0.0.
