ABSTRACT
During the few hundred years that elapsed between the beginnings of Greek civilization and the end of the 6th century, art was constituting its domain, elaborating types, and experimenting with technique. It was a slow preparation, as ever in the beginning, since development accelerates as time goes on, and the later stages are more rapid. Though the artist required several centuries in which to dominate his material and bend it to his archaic ideal, it only needed some hundred years for the idealism of the 5th century to be succeeded by the still timid realism of the 4th, and another century for this to develop into the keenly pursued Hellenistic naturalism. But we should not forget that this period of trial and groping enabled art, about 500, to become emancipated from its early fetters, and to arrive, a few decades later, at the perfection of Periclean Atticism.
