Greek and Roman Sculpture: The Gods in Marble and Bronze
The gods of ancient Greece and Rome were not abstract theological principles. They were presences — beings whose nature could be known through the exercise of reason, whose character could be studied in myth, and whose physical form could be given definitive expression in stone and bronze. The great sculptors of Athens, Corinth, and Rhodes — working in the 5th through 1st centuries BCE — understood their task as theological as much as artistic: to find the perfect visual form for a divine quality, the precise shape of courage or wisdom or beauty as it would manifest if the divine became flesh. The results transformed Western aesthetics permanently. Every ideal of physical beauty in the Western tradition — every later Renaissance figure, every Baroque sculpture, every neoclassical statue — is haunted by the achievement of the Greek sculptors who first showed what the perfect human form looks like when it embodies a divine idea. Parthenon frieze — South cavalcade (c. ...