Comparison of the Ideas between Greece and Rome
The Roman Empire exploited art for its political purposes like no other state before. Inheriting the Etruscan manner in art and culture, for a long time the Romans had built of wood and mud bricks and modeled sculptures of painted terracotta (Kleiner, 2014, p. 181). In the third century, after the conquest of the Sicilian Greek city of Syracuse, Greek art became available to the Romans and its influence spread to architecture, sculpture and other forms of fine art.
Meanwhile, the Greeks began to build temples of stone rather than wood as early as the seventh century BCE and invented the Doric and Ionic orders (Kleiner, 2014, p. 109). The Corinthian order developed in the late fifth century BCE and was very favored by the Romans. The Greek architectural principles were simple and elegant. Temples were usually designed with the correlation between the width and the length 1:2 or 1:3 (Kleiner, 2014, p. 105). Greek temples, made of marble, demonstrated direct lines while the Romans were able to build different types of vaults and domes thanks to the possibilities of concrete (Kleiner, 2014, p. 184).
Greece had the rise of sculpture and painting in the fifth BCE when artists believed that they could reach the ideal in art. An example of it is an ideal system of proportions used in Polykleitos’s Doryphoros (Kleiner, 2014, p. 145). In 146 BCE, Greece became a Roman province. The Roman Empire had waves of love to Greek culture. For example, Hadrian introduced a new period of all things Greek. In mural painting, the First Style distinctly originated from Greece while the Second Style was unmistakably Roman (Kleiner, 2014, p. 181).
In Greece, the experiments of the Late Classical Period introduced Hellenistic realism when the subject of depiction ranged from old and distorted in battles faces and bodies to openly erotic goddesses. The Romans also saw the necessity to portray people the way they are. They had a period when aged rulers were depicted with wrinkles as a sign of wisdom. Another example is the full-size equestrian sculpted portrait of Marcus Aurelius who has a weary and worried face
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