IV Luxury Items

Extract

The uneven survival of material evidence from Greek antiquity has tended to guide interest and research towards the diferent forms and functions of sculpture (Chapters II and III) and of vase-painting (Chapters V and VI). They have been preserved in such numbers that, although we have only a fraction of the total output, we can study the ways in which they developed over the centuries against the social, economic, and political background and in the diferent parts of the Greek world. This has encouraged a tendency towards positivism and has had the unfortunate outcome of considering them as the exclusive elements of Greek art, with a concomitant emphasis on the aspects of restraint, simplicity, and so forth that were highlighted by the Neoclassical attitudes to Greek art that emerged in the eighteenth century. This approach has led scholars to demean the more lavish products that, by the very nature of their intrinsic value, have failed to survive in any numbers – gold, silver, ivory, and the like. Recent excavations, particularly those in cemeteries situated in the outlying areas of the Greek world and in the regions bordering on ancient Greece, have brought to light some of those expensive objects that are now missing from the Greek heartlands. Meanwhile, investigations into the more flamboyant aspects of Greek art have shown that buildings and architectural and freestanding sculpture were lavishly coloured. A nineteenth-century drawing by Donaldson shows coloured glass beads set into a column capital of the Erechtheion (Figure 21).