Ancient and Classical Art: Prehistory, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome
The PAU asks you to recognise a prehistoric, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek or Roman work, place it in a period (an approximate date is enough), describe it with the correct technical vocabulary and explain how function shapes form. Precise terms earn marks as much as identification does.
Core rules and concepts
- Prehistory. Upper Palaeolithic cave painting (Altamira, Lascaux) uses mineral pigments - iron oxides, manganese, charcoal - applied with fingers, pads or blown through a tube; animals are drawn in profile and modelled with shading, with almost no ground line. Levantine rock art (Cogull, Roca dels Moros) is smaller, schematic and narrative, often with archers and hunting scenes. Megalithism adds dolmens, menhirs and gallery graves.
- Egypt. The composite view combines a profile face, a frontal eye and frontal shoulders with profile legs; registers and hierarchical scale organise the wall; the Old Kingdom canon fits the standing figure into an 18-square grid. Amarna art breaks the canon under Akhenaten; the restoration follows.
- Mesopotamia. The ziggurat is an artificial mountain and raised temple platform; the Hammurabi stele pairs relief with cuneiform law; votive figures stand with clasped hands; lamassu guard gateways; cylinder seals served administration.
- Greece. Kouros and kore are frontal, smiling, with weight on both feet; the Severe style introduces contrapposto; Polykleitos builds a seven-head canon (Doryphoros). Orders: Doric (no base, plain capital), Ionic (volutes, continuous frieze), Corinthian (acanthus). The Parthenon (447–432 BC) uses optical corrections.
- Rome. Veristic portraiture, the arch–vault–dome system, concrete (opus caementicium), the Pantheon (c. 125 AD), historical relief such as Trajan's Column (113 AD), and the four Pompeian styles.
Worked example
Given the Kritios Boy (c. 480 BC), do not write "an archaic statue". Identify: marble, slightly under life size, from the Athenian Acropolis. Describe: the left leg bears the weight, the hip rises on that side, the head turns slightly - the earliest surviving contrapposto. Contrast with a kouros: the Archaic smile has gone and the pelvis is no longer a flat block. Context: the passage from Archaic to Severe style, at the moment of the Persian Wars. That chain - identification, formal description, comparison, context - is the expected answer format.
Traps that cost marks
- Black-figure means black silhouettes on red clay with incised detail; red-figure means red figures reserved on a black ground with painted lines.
- Many "Greek" marbles are Roman copies; say so instead of ignoring it.
- Egyptian figures are not fully frontal: only the shoulders and the eye are.
- Do not date the Parthenon before the Persian Wars, and do not confuse the Doric frieze (triglyphs and metopes) with the Ionic continuous frieze.