The Beginning of Narrative Art in the Greek Geometric Period

The very familiarity of Greek art is apt to make us take its development very much for granted. It has a beginning in the isolated silhouettes and matchstick processions of Geometric art; progresses through an ever more faithful, that is to say illusionistic, rendering of the objects of the natural world to classic formalism; goes on to the remarkable technical proficiency of the third century B.C.; and finally declines in late Hellenistic sterilities before being absorbed and transformed by Imperial Rome and the Early Christians. It seems to be a sort of organic process: birth, flowering, and death follow in such a logical and apparently inevitable fashion that it is difficult not to be seduced by the metaphor.