Classical style
A style of architecture and decoration broadly based on ancient Greece and Rome from 700 B.C. to 330 A.D. Recurs constantly throughout the history of Western European art, particularly since the Renaissance up to the 19th century. Also see classical orders, classicism, Classical Revival style, Greek Revival style, Jeffersonian, neoantique, neoclassical. Photo from the Second Bank of the United States, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2017. (Kremer, 2023) 2. When capitalized, Classical Style refers to the sculptor’s new understanding of what he could achieve once he had decided to look, continued to be expressed in the standing male, and the succession is clear, from the early Classical Apollos, to Polyclitus’ Doryphorus, and, in the fourth century, Lysippus’ athlete Apoxyomenus. Progress was slow but certain in rendering the effect on the body of a shift in its weight and balance, or of partly resting on a separate support. This may seem little enough, but it was novel and could have appeared grotesquely inadequate in the hands of the incompetent or imperceptive. Fighting or exercising figures are often less subtle but no less accurate in the observation of life which they display, but there is an age of experience between Myron’s discus-thrower who is virtually a freestanding relief, and Lysippus’ who seems to pull the viewer round to admire him from any angle. Frontality came naturally to an Archaic artist and was encouraged by architectural sculpture and the setting of most statues. The abandonment of the implied frame or backdrop in statuary was answered in painting by a new sense of space which had also to be balanced in the composition. (Boardman, 1986)