The severe style, or Early Classic style, was the dominant idiom of Greek sculpture in the period ca. 490 to 450 BCE. It marks the breakdown of the canonical forms of archaic art and the transition to the greatly expanded vocabulary and expression of the classical moment of the late 5th century. It was an international style found at many cities in the Hellenic world and in a variety of media including:bronze sculpture in the round, stelae, and architectural relief. The style perhaps realized its greatest fulfillment in the metopes of the Temple of Zeus, Olympia.
The term "severe style" was first coined by Gustav Kramer in his Uber den styl und die Herkunft der bemahlten griechischen Thongefasse (1837, Berlin) in reference to the first generation of red figure vase painters; the name has since Vagn Poulsen’s 1937 study Der strenge stil become exclusively associated with sculpture.
Read more about Severe Style: Dating and Relative Chronology, General Characteristics, Individual Masters, List of Selected Works
Famous quotes containing the words severe and/or style:
“from deep in the dark head
his smile glowing
outward into the
room’s severe twilight,
he lies....”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)