Greek sculptors sought above everything else to represent the most beautiful bodies in a calm and noble attitude. They had a thousand occasions for viewing beautiful bodies of men in beautiful poses, at the gymnasium, in the army, in the sacred dances and choruses. They studied them and learned to reproduce them; no one has ever better executed the human body.
Usually in a Greek statue the head is small, the face without emotion and dull. The Greeks did not seek, as we do, the expression of the face; they strove for beauty of line and did not sacrifice the limbs for the head. In a Greek statue it is the whole body that is beautiful.
Pottery.—The Greeks came to make pottery a real art. They called it Ceramics (the potter's art), and this name is still preserved. Pottery had not the same esteem in Greece as the other arts, but for us it has the great advantage of being better known than the others. While temples and statues fell into ruin, the achievements of Greek potters are preserved in the tombs. This is where they are found today. Already more than 20,000 specimens have been collected in all the museums of Europe. They are of two sorts:
1. Painted vases, with black or red figures, of all sizes and every form;
2. Statuettes of baked earth; hardly known twenty years ago, they have now attained almost to celebrity since the discovery of the charming figurines of Tanagra in Bœotia. The most of them are little idols, but some represent children or women.
Painting.—There were illustrious painters in Greece—Zeuxis, Parrhasius, and Apelles. We know little of them beyond some anecdotes, often doubtful, and some descriptions of pictures. To obtain an impression of Greek painting we are limited to the frescoes found in the houses of Pompeii, an Italian city of the first century of our era. This amounts to the same as saying we know nothing of it.