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Andalusia PAU History of Art study materials
Andalusia PAU History of Art study resources

Andalusia PAU History of Art: Ancient and Classical Art: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome

Andalusia PAU History of Art · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.

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Ancient and Classical Art: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome

This domain covers Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman art. The PAU tests whether you can identify conventions, materials and functions, place works in chronology, and explain how art served religion, royal power and civic identity. Short questions usually ask you to define a type or describe a work from memory; the longer question asks you to compare two works and account for their differences.

Mesopotamia: the image as instrument

  • The ziggurat is a stepped temple platform (Ur, c. 2100 BC), not a tomb. It raises the god's house above the city and organizes the sanctuary, storerooms and stairways around ritual access.
  • Votive statues from Tell Asmar (c. 2700 BC) stand with clasped hands and inlaid eyes: the gesture signals perpetual prayer, the eyes presence before the deity.
  • The Stele of Hammurabi (c. 1750 BC) combines a relief of the king before Shamash with a cuneiform law code, joining divine authority to legal text.
  • Lamassu, the winged human-headed bulls at Assyrian gates, are apotropaic guardians placed at thresholds.

Egypt: a conceptual canon

  • The standing figure is built on an 18-square grid; the body uses a composite view (profile head, frontal shoulders, profile legs) so each part appears in its clearest aspect.
  • Composition works in registers with hieratic scale: size signals importance, not distance. Material follows function - limestone and painted plaster in tombs, granite for enduring royal images. The tomb served the ka, so the image had to remain recognizable.
  • The Amarna period under Akhenaten breaks the canon with elongated skulls, swollen bellies and informal intimacy.

Greece: orders and the body

  • Doric: no base, plain capital, alternating triglyphs and metopes. Ionic: base, volute capital, continuous frieze. Corinthian: acanthus capital. Refinements include entasis and a curved stylobate.
  • The kouros moves from rigid frontal stance to contrapposto (Kritios Boy, c. 480 BC), then to Polykleitos' canon in the Doryphoros (c. 440 BC). Hellenistic work adds pathos, diagonal composition and viewer involvement (Laocoön, Pergamon Altar).

Rome: engineering and rhetoric

  • Opus caementicium (concrete) makes the arch, barrel and groin vault, and the dome possible; the Pantheon spans 43.3 m with an oculus.
  • Portraiture ranges from Republican verism to imperial idealization; historical relief (Trajan's Column) narrates conquest. Wall painting follows four styles, from simulated masonry to illusionistic architecture.

Worked example: Doryphoros and Augustus of Prima Porta

Start with form: the Doryphoros shows chiastic contrapposto, an idealized athletic body and no portrait. Augustus borrows the stance and the adlocutio gesture but adds a portrait head, a cuirass carved with the return of the standards and cosmic imagery, and bare feet that hint at divinization. The reasoning is functional: Greek ideal form supplies a visual language of authority, while the head and cuirass carry Roman political content. This is what a comparison answer should do - name the shared form, then explain the different purpose.

Traps that cost marks

  • Treating Roman copies as Greek originals without saying so.
  • Calling Egyptian figures bad anatomy instead of explaining a conceptual canon.
  • Confusing Doric and Ionic friezes, or the ziggurat with a tomb.
  • Describing Hellenistic emotion without naming the formal devices that produce it.