Reply To: Progression or regression?

[tmbergan]

Although they do still have pieces for their gods and goddesses, I feel like the Hellenistic art was a progression of the Greek humanist values. Rather than having their deities placed above them, the Greeks started to show them in more human ways as they played games like dice and equated them more than just strong youthful figures — the Sleeping Eros shows a god in an entirely different light then they were generally shown. He’s portrayed as a cherub rather than a man like previous gods would have been. In the Hellenistic art, they equated their deities with humans, placed more emphasis on a more realistic human body with normal proportions, and allowed their sculptures to show a larger range of human emotions, as we saw in the Laocoon, rather than keeping their expressions vague with the archaic smile. To me, these all appear to be progressive as they really emphasized genuine humans.