Greek Art and Architecture

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Greek art covers roughly nine centuries, from about 900 BC to the Roman conquest, across a world that stretched from Sicily and southern Italy to the coast of Asia Minor. Painted pottery gives the clearest running record. Athenian workshops moved from black figures on orange clay, handled with engraved precision by Exekias around 540 BC, to red-figure painting from about 530 BC, in which figures were left the colour of the clay against a black ground. The Niobid Painter, active around 460 BC, set figures on uneven ground lines to suggest depth.

Sculptors learned to make a body turn and settle. The Kritios Boy (about 480 BC) rests its weight on one leg, and the two bronze warriors found off Riace in 1972 show the confident anatomy of the mid-5th century. Builders perfected the stone temple and Theodoros of Phokaia designed the circular tholos at Delphi in the early 4th century BC.