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Period: 599 BCE to 400 BCE
Classical Greece
The 5th and 4th Centuries BCE saw the rise and fall of the Athenian empire and Macedonian ascendancy. It was during this time that philosophy first flourished in Asia Minor and then in the Athenian schools. This was the birth of the principles of reason and proportion to which artists and thinkers would return again and again. -
570 BCE
Death of Sappho
We know little of her life, have only fragments of her poetry, and can at best surmise that she was probably a musician. We don't know much. And yet, Sappho's fragments sing to us from an age from which the music is otherwise silent. She was in antiquity considered one of the great Greek poets, the only woman to share this distinction. It is likely that her lyrics were set to music, as seems to have been typical of lyrical poets from the time. -
495 BCE
Death of Pythagoras
Pythagoras was unquestionably the most influential pre-Socratic philosopher. His Idealism would influence Socrates, direct Plato's later phase of thought, and provide fundamentals of geometry and music still taught today. -
479 BCE
Persian Invasions
Two separate attempts to overrun Greece, in 492-490 BCE and 481-479 BCE, were both repulsed by the combined efforts of Greece's several city states. This helped cultivate a sense of unity, of a shared culture and fate, between the many independent states. -
430 BCE
Death of Phidias
No Greek sculptor can match the achievement of Phidias, the artist responsible for the Zeus at Olympia. Though all of his work is lost, it would have been widely imitated in his own time, and no other sculptor would have had such an influence on the period's sculpture. -
404 BCE
Peloponnesian War Ends
After Athens began to consolidate its empire through domination of the Delian League, friction with Sparta was inevitable. Beginning in 431, the war was a disaster for both of the Greek's leading cities, but Athens, suffering a plague in the midst of war, took the hardest blow and was defeated by Sparta. -
356 BCE
Alexander the Great is Born
Alexander, though not Greek, received a Greek education. After uniting the weakened Greek cities, he would go on to conquer Asia Minor, Egypt, the Middle East, Persia and Afghanistan, spreading what we now call Hellenic Culture through the world. -
Period: 299 BCE to Dec 25, 600
Classical Rome
From the second century BCE through the Pax Romana, Rome emerged as a major regional power and then as the region's dominant power. Heavily influenced by the Classical Greek example, Roman art and architecture entered its own phase of rational relation. We will look as far as Constantine. -
Period: Dec 24, 600 to Dec 25, 1399
Medieval Period
From the Dark Ages, as the Western Roman Empire crumbled and Frankish nobles strung together tenuous principalities, to the dawn of the Renaissance, the Middle Ages was largely a period of fear and superstition, one in which the ubiquitous presence of suffering and death created a society governed by our more frightful emotional spectrum. -
Period: Dec 24, 1400 to
Renaissance
Another flowering of culture under the influence of ultimately classical Greek notions. It was the rediscovery of Greek texts, provided by Muslims, in the High Middle Ages, that helped provide the intellectual foundation upon which the Renaissance would grow. -
Period: to
Baroque
As the pendulum swings inevitably from the ordered aspirations of the Renaissance, we enter the Baroque, an artistic period characterized by flighty emotions. Rather than the preoccupation with damnation seen in the fearful Middle Ages, the Baroque aspires towards ornamentation and a sense of overwhelming beauty. -
Period: to
Classical
Once again returning to the foundation of reason and proportion, we enter the classical period. The pendulum has was away from the perceived excesses of the Baroque, and artists now find beauty in symmetry, delineation. -
Period: to
Romantic
Seeing the Classical as too restrained, the Romantics sought an expression of Nature through emotional, often spontaneously-seeming, expressions. Hence a return to the emotional expressions, even the spookier influence of the Middle Ages, work their way into art. What began in the spirit of self-determination, of course, would turn violent in the nationalistic tendency of Romantic art. -
Period: to
Modernism
Here things seem to fall apart, to borrow from Yeats. But Yeats is perhaps to apocalyptic. The modern period remains an enigma, as we are still working our way through it (for example, do we stop to draw a new line for post-modernism?). Still, there seems to be two consistent concerns: first is popular access; the second is a kind of derangement induced by hyper-rationality--the way a computer's calculations are perfectly rational yet also, to human phenomenology, absurd.