Ancient Authors on Art

Today a student came up with an extra credit assignment for Leslie Lambert’s art history class. She had to find a book written by an ancient person (in the time of Plato etc.) that dealt with art. I can find plenty of items about ancient art, but not many firsthand accounts. Most of the ancient authors write about philosophy or politics, or just straight up poetry/literature. I finally managed to find The Ten Books on Architecture by Vitruvius Pollio (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/20239) and she will be using that.

I tried a Google Books search, with art, artwork, and sculpture as varying search terms and trying to limit publication dates to between 1 and 1000, but that didn’t get much. I also looked at Project Gutenberg, but I couldn’t find an easy way to look for information. The Internet Classics Archive (http://classics.mit.edu/) has a lot of ancient texts (441) but you have to search by author. That is slow going.

I think our best resource is the ancient Greece/Rome volume of Arts & Humanities Through the Eras (REF NX440 .A787 2005). This gives the On Architecture work, and mentions that Pliny the Elder addresses the use of metals and stones in his work Natural History. Chapter 9 is devoted to the visual arts and gives some written primary sources that could be explored (“Vitruvius on Contemporary Roman Wall Painting,” for instance).

Scott also found some JSTOR articles that might give some good primary sources. Their titles are:

• Ovid's Attitude toward the Roman Theater
• Attitude of the Ante-Nicene Fathers Toward Greek Artistic Achievement
• Notes on Diligentia as a Term of Roman Art Criticism
• Quintilian on Painting and Statuary
• The Roman Attitude toward Foreign Influence, Particularly toward the Greek Influence during the Republic

He suggested a few people to look into:

• Cicero
• Plato
• Aristotle
• Xenocrates
• Quintilian
• Apelles
• Antigonus
  

Good luck!