Not a single example of the masterpieces celebrated among the
Greeks has come down to us. Our most famous Greek statues are either
copies, like the Venus of Milo, or works of the period of the
decadence, like the Apollo of the Belvidere.[93] Still there remains
enough, uniting the fragments of statues and of bas-reliefs which are
continually being discovered,[94] to give us a general conception of
Greek sculpture.
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.
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