Kritios and Nesiotes as Revolutionary Artists? Ancient and Archaeological Perspectives on the So-Called Severe Style Period

Abstract

This article focuses on periodization in ancient art history, on aesthetic notions and judgments in ancient literary sources, and on the creation of the modern stylistic and cultural classification of the Severe Style period. Conventionally, this stylistic phase spans from ca. 480 to 450 B.C.E. and is generally associated with a new style adopted by artists soon after the Persian Wars and with the sculptural group of the Tyrannicides by Kritios and Nesiotes. This investigation provides an overview of the artistic production by Kritios and Nesiotes and analysis of signed monuments from the Athenian Acropolis; an examination of literary sources concerning Kritios and Nesiotes and aesthetic judgments regarding Late Archaic artists and their works in Greek and Latin sources from the end of the fourth century to the Early Imperial period; and an exploration of the modern meaning of the Greek and Latin words skleros and durus ("rigid, motionless, stiff " rather than "severe"). I propose that it is not possible to distinguish such a "Severe Style period," since technical and stylistic improvements are detectable on statues dating from before 480 B.C.E., and that a paradigm of continuity, as suggested by ancient literary sources and archaeological evidence, is preferable to a clear-cut division of artistic periods and styles. 1 introduction The principal aim of this article is to outline an art history according to ancient writers by bringing together literary sources and archaeological records and using the aesthetic and technical parameters employed in the ancient world. This approach compels us to reflect on the invention, use, and limits of the so-called Severe Style period (ca. 480-450 B.C.E.), a modern stylistic and 1 This work began in 2013 thanks to a research grant to study Pliny the Elder's Books of Art, funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research and carried out at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa. Some parts of the work were presented at universities, in Tsukuba and Foggia (2014), Oxford (2016), Rome and Edinburgh (2017), and Pisa (2018). I am very grateful to

8 Greek art: recent developments and current trends

“…Interventions on style, chronology, and artists continue to be produced, mostly taking the form of journal articles (e.g. Adornato 2019, Severe Style; Goette 2021, Archaic; Kansteiner 2021, Polykleitos). Other publications seek out wider technical, stylistic, and historical connections that can be drawn from sculptures, among them edited volumes on Greek and Roman Bronzes (Descamps-Lequime and Mille 2017), another on the ‘intermediality’ of sculpted image and inscribed text (Dietrich and Fouquet 2022), and a series of lectures given in Paris that connects sculptures of all periods to images on vases, mosaics, and other arts (Hölscher 2018).…”