They executed bas-reliefs to adorn the walls of a temple, its facade or its pediment.  Of this style of work is the famous frieze of the Panathenaic procession which was carved around the Parthenon, representing young Athenian women on the day of the great festival of the goddess.[91]

They sculptured statues for the most part, of which some represented gods and served as idols; others represented athletes victorious in the great games, and these were the recompense of his victory.

The most ancient statues of the Greeks are stiff and rude, quite similar to the Assyrian sculptures.  They are often colored.  Little by little they become graceful and elegant.  The greatest works are those of Phidias in the fifth century and of Praxiteles in the fourth.  The statues of the following centuries are more graceful, but less noble and less powerful.

There were thousands of statues in Greece,[92] for every city had its own, and the sculptors produced without cessation for five centuries.  Of all this multitude there remain to us hardly fifteen complete statues.  Not a single example of the masterpieces celebrated among the Greeks has come down to us.  Our most famous Greek statues are either copies, like the Venus of Milo, or works of the period of the decadence, like the Apollo of the Belvidere.[93] Still there remains enough, uniting the fragments of statues and of bas-reliefs which are continually being discovered,[94] to give us a general conception of Greek sculpture.

Greek sculptors sought above everything else to represent the most beautiful bodies in a calm and noble attitude.  They had a thousand occasions for viewing beautiful bodies of men in beautiful poses, at the gymnasium, in the army, in the sacred dances and choruses.  They studied them and learned to reproduce them; no one has ever better executed the human body.

Usually in a Greek statue the head is small, the face without emotion and dull.  The Greeks did not seek, as we do, the expression of the face; they strove for beauty of line and did not sacrifice the limbs for the head.  In a Greek statue it is the whole body that is beautiful.

=Pottery.=—­The Greeks came to make pottery a real art.  They called it Ceramics (the potter’s art), and this name is still preserved.  Pottery had not the same esteem in Greece as the other arts, but for us it has the great advantage of being better known than the others.  While temples and statues fell into ruin, the achievements of Greek potters are preserved in the tombs.  This is where they are found today.  Already more than 20,000 specimens have been collected in all the museums of Europe.  They are of two sorts: 

  1.  Painted vases, with black or red figures, of all sizes and
  every form;