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:
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—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)