Foreign Influences on Archaic Greek Art: A Study

While walking the Greek Art Section in the Metropolitan Museum, people could easily be captivated by the grandiose of one Archaic Period sculpture named Kouros(Youth), a beautiful male nude stone statue. Although it is true that, at the first glance, most people would mistreated this statue as an Egyptian one, for its straight and simple style, which derives from the Sinai Peninsula, this statue is actually from Athen, the center of Greek. Nevertheless, this similarity still arouses people’s curiosities: why and how the Archaic Period Greek statues resembled with the Egyptian one? Is there any other culture also influenced the Greek Art? Thus, this essay is going to discuss how two main foreign cultures: the Egyptian culture and the Ionic culture

Still, the Kouros status in the Metropolitan Museum is a perfect example. Like what this essay has conducted earlier, this figure is made of marble, a hard stone. According to the status description from the museum, we could know that the Greek actually “learned” how “to quarry stone and plan the execution of large-scale statues from the Egyptians”(anonymity, Description of Marble statue of a Kouros, metmuseum. org). Before the Archaic Period, mostly the medium are the bronze. However, back at that time, comparing to the immature greek statue artists, the Egyptian craftsmen had already worked with the hard stone for centuries. Thus, smart greek artists studied Egyptian’s techniques: they also used marble and other kind of hard stones as the medium, but to some extent they changed the way that Egyptian usually depicted the sculpture. For example, Egyptian artists would depict the status as a clothes on figure instead of a nude one like what most Greek artists had presented. Those are tips which people could use to distinguish the Archaic Period Greek statues and the contemporaneous Egyptian statues. On the other hand, the Egyptian statue also

Before the Archaic Period, the major elements on the Greek potteries are the geometric patterns such as Zigzag, Triangle, and Meander. However, in the archaic period, the major elements become the palmate and the volute. The Palmate: the palm tree leaf shape figure and the volute: the swirling figure are two of the major elements in Ionic Culture, and these two elements are widely used by Greek artists not only on the potteries but also on the architectural structures. In terms of the architectural, one of the good examples would be the Marble column from the Temple of Artemis at Sardis. This huge column is about 361 cm height, and despite of its humongous size, its capital is also worth consideration. The capital is constituted of two huge volute patterns, and in the middle of the volute are three separate palmate figures. In this column, people could see these two Ionic elements separately are presented in one piece of art. In term of greek pottery, one of the good examples would be the Terracotta amphora (storage jar). As people could see, this jar is divided by the horizontal band, and its main body is cover by both the palmate and the volute figures. However, different from the column which separately presents these two different elements, this jar combines the palmate and the volute together and forms a new