Western culture. The stories told in Greek art and literature of gods and heroes have been retold
ever since and continue to form a common ground for the art, literature, and even popular culture
of the Western world.Our knowledge of ancient Greek painting, especially wall and panel
painting, is limited by the small number of examples that have survived. Most of what we know
about Greek painting comes from ancient literary sources, surviving Roman copies, and a
number of Greek vases and mosaics that probably reflect some of the attributes of Greek wall
paintings.Literary sources mention only a handful of painters’ names from the Archaic period,
including Cleanthes of Corinth, Boularchos, and Cimon. For the most part scholars can only
guess at how these paintings looked, but some evidence survives in scraps of paintings by
unknown artists that decorated the walls of a temple at Isthm??a, near Corinth; in painted
terracotta metopes from Th??rmon in western Greece; and in a few wooden and clay plaques
from Corinth and Athens.
Some of the most complete surviving examples of early Greek panel painting are scenes of
banqueting and diving painted by an unknown artist for a tomb at Paestum, Italy (490?-470? BC,
Museo Archeologico, Paestum). The figures in the Paestum frescoes show skillful drawing and a
developed understanding of human anatomy. The artist has drawn eyes in profile, instead of
frontally, and included elements of landscape.
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