In this early Greek painting from around 800 B.C.E., Odysseus leaps up to blind Polyphemus the cyclops. Known as the Orientalizing style, Egyptian and Minoan influences are mixed with a Greek interest in illustrating motion.

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," --that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

This mosaic from the northern Greek town of Pella depicts a stag hunt. Shading is used to illustrate the three-dimensionality of the subjects.

The first hint of the extraordinary nature of Greek painting comes from their early period pottery (c. 800-480 B.C.E.). Pottery in Greece played an important role in every Athenian home. Vases functioned as containers for wines and oils — must-haves for any Greek party or funeral. But Greek pottery was more than just a craft. For the first time, individual artists — mainly Athenian painters — were recognized far and wide for their artistic skills.

Many of the early vase paintings share similar stylistic features with Egyptian and Minoan art, particularly the positioning of the full-frontal eye in a profiled face. Even at this early period, however, Greek artists display such an interest in motion that even the lively Minoan art appears comparatively static.

In other vase paintings, figures run, crawl, wrestle, or dance. These spirited paintings relate entire stories of Greek heroes and gods, the glories of monarchs, and explanations for how the world was created and why — sometimes all on a single vase.

The first prominent style developed by the Athenians was the black-figure technique, in which the figures were silhouetted against a reddish-orange background, with details incised in black paint. One outstanding black-figure painter was Exekias, who had a remarkable sense of composition and eye for detail.

Around 525 B.C.E., the introduction of the red-figure technique ushered in another major transformation in Greek art. Now red figures stood out against a black background. Details were no longer carved into the vase. Instead, Greek artists drew directly on the vase with black paint. The red-figure style allowed artists immensely greater precision.

Euthymides was a contemporary and rival of Euphronius. Like Euphronius, Euthymides wanted to capture the sense of movement. This vase from c. 500 B.C.E. is famously inscribed "Euphronius never did anything like this!"

Some of these large paintings were reproduced on vases, though. These copies suggest that around the time of the Persian Wars (490-479 B.C.E.), Athenian artists begin to experiment with spatial depth, shading, and color blending to indicate volume and even linear perspective.

None of these achievements, however, was used with complete consistency. Shading was done on an object-by-object basis, rather than by using a single light source for the whole painting. Likewise, instead of a painting as a whole having one vanishing point, each object in a work had its own. But for the first time in prehistory or history, artists moved from a flat, two-dimensional representation of humans and their world to a reasonably accurate, three-dimensional one.

This wooden Pitsa Tablet was painted to represent a sacrificial procession. This is a rare surviving example of miniature painting from the Greek world.

The wooden Pitsa Tablets and a few other surviving fragments of architectural decoration are reminders that painted pottery of this period paralleled contemporary painting on wood. On these wooden remains, artists applied color in flat washes, and human figures are presented in a style similar to those on black-figure vases.

One of the few Greek works that uses shading to show the three-dimensionality of figures is a 4th-century B.C.E. stag-hunting mosaic from Pella, Alexander the Great's birthplace, in northern Greece. This rare example of art from the period also offers an idea of what Greek monumental painting might have looked like.

When in Rome...Do as the Greeks Did

The frescoes unearthed at Pompeii are among the only physical evidence of Roman painting. This painting of a cityscape gives the illusion of deep space inside a private home.

The most complete and majestic Roman frescoes are found in the houses at Pompeii and Herculaneum that were buried and preserved under 15 to 20 feet of hot ash and debris when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 C.E. Astounding landscapes, complex vistas of architecture, narrative scenes from mythology, and even still lifes decorate the walls of these cities.

Styles range from great detail and precision to quick, almost impressionistic, brushstrokes. Shading is used, although the light doesn't come consistently from one direction. Textures are carefully rendered so that a piece of fruit and a glass full of water are clearly distinguishable. In a famous series of scenes from the Odyssey, the colors of the mountains in the background decrease in intensity to indicate that they are farther away — an early attempt at atmospheric perspective.

Art was on the move. By leaps and bounds, the Greeks and Romans began to decipher the mysteries that lie behind painting. Their interest in human movement, however, ultimately proved to be fleeting. By the 4th century C.E., when Christianity became a widespread phenomenon, art ascended from the human world and into the spiritual realm, and artists' focus shifted from the body to the soul.

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