Ancient Greek Art Quotes

Our minds can go no further. The human imagination is capable of no further expression of beauty than the carved owl of Athene, the archaic, marble serpent, the arrogant selfish head of the Acropolis Apollo.

We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their roots in Greece. But for Greece… we might still have been savages and idolators.

I sometimes wonder if the hand is not more sensitive to the beauties of sculpture than the eye. I should think the wonderful rhythmical flow of lines and curves could be more subtly felt than seen. Be this as it may, I know that I can feel the heart-throbs of the ancient Greeks in their marble gods and goddesses.

The shield of Achilles was a great work of art; Homer devoted an entire chant of the Iliad to describing it. I suppose that the Americans would cast and mould such a shield in a few hours

All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.

The Elgin Marbles were supposed to be on the Parthenon. For many works of art, a museum is an artificial setting - a zoo, not a natural habitat.

She resembles the Venus de Milo: she is very old, has no teeth, and has white spots on her yellow skin.

I've met and sketched most of the great athletes from the past five decades and their movement, grace and energy have kept me captivated over the years. That's what the ancient Greeks first saw and that's what caught my interest.

I would like to be a philosopher in ancient Athens and a poet in ancient China.

Pictures of Amazons on vase paintings always show them as beautiful, active, spirited, courageous, and brave.

People who look at Greek statues never say it's a shame because they're not complete.

If you see a wonderful archaic Greek marble object in a museum, it's not only that it's beautiful, but what comes to your mind is the fact that it's 2,600 or so years old, and it was done by a human being at that time who you have such a limited ability to grasp - and yet you have this enormous ability to grasp.

Indeed, many ancient Greek writers do treat Amazons as a tribe of men and women. They credit the tribe with innovations such as ironworking and domestication of horses. Some early vase paintings show men fighting alongside Amazons.

The adoration of human nature by the Greeks appeared in Greek plastic art and was the cause of its excellence.

There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.

I've never studied the classics, but I'd like to. My teacher offered to show me how the Greeks were able to sculpt someone perfectly. From there, you can go off and experiment - sort of like jazz. Once you learn to play anything, you can break the form and go and do something even bigger.

In Sparta, paintings have been taken out of certain walls by cutting through the bricks, then have been placed in wooden frames, and so brought to the Comitium to adorn the aedileship of [C. Visellius] Varro and [C. Licinius] Murena.