Culture, social structure and the status of visual artists in classical Greece

Recent contributions to the debate on the role, status and autonomy of the artist in classical Greece remain polarised in terms which have remained largely unchanged for more than a century. On one side, we find ‘modernisers’ who hold that the role of the artist, the function of art and the social structure of the Greek art world was more similar to the modern western art world than different. On the other side are ranged the ‘primitivists’ who argue that modern conceptions of artistic autonomy and creativity are an anachronistic imposition on ancient Greek art, which was a largely anonymous craft, performing traditional functions and oriented to the reproduction of traditional artistic forms rather than the individualistic innovation held to be characteristic of western European art since the Renaissance. The modernisers look back to Winckelmann's neo-classical view of the Greek artist as free and autonomous creator, whilst the primitivists ultimately draw their inspiration from Jacob Burckhardt's alternative account of the Greek artist as mechanical craftsman or banausos. In this century, the primary point of reference for the debate has been Bernard Schweitzer's argument that whilst artists were held in low esteem during the classical period of Greek history, the fifth and fourth centuries, they came to be recognised as ‘creative’ in the Hellenistic period, the third to first centuries B.C. More recent contributions have largely been concerned with adducing, or criticising, new evidence for one or other side of the debate, whilst retaining the assumptions within which the debate was set up in the nineteenth century.