While Athens began to decline during the fourth century BCE, the influence of Greek cities in southern Italy and Sicily spread to indigenous cultures that readily adopted Greek styles and employed Greek artists. Depictions of Athenian drama, which flourished in the fifth century with the work of Aeschylus, Sophokles, and Euripides, was an especially popular subject for locally produced pottery (24.97.104).

During the mid-fourth century BCE, Macedonia (in northern Greece) became a formidable power under Philip II (c. 360/359–336 BCE), and the Macedonian royal court became the leading center of Greek culture. Philip’s military and political achievements ably served the conquests of his son, Alexander the Great (r. 336–323 BCE). Within eleven years, Alexander subdued the Persian empire of western Asia and Egypt, continuing into Central Asia as far as the Indus River Valley. During his reign, Alexander cultivated the arts as no patron had done before him. Among his retinue of artists was the court sculptor Lysippos, arguably one of the most important artists of the fourth century BCE. His works, most notably his portraits of Alexander (and the work they influenced), inaugurated many features of Hellenistic sculpture, such as the heroic ruler portrait (52.127.4). When Alexander died in 323 BCE, his successors, many of whom adopted this portrait type, divided up the vast empire into smaller kingdoms that transformed the political and cultural world during the Hellenistic period (c. 323–31 BCE).

Late Classical Greek Art

Despite continued military activity throughout the “Late Classical Period” (400–323 B.C.E.), artistic production and development continued apace.

In addition to a new figural aesthetic in the fourth century known for its longer torsos and limbs, and smaller heads (for example, the Apoxyomenos), the first female nude was produced. Known as the Aphrodite of Knidos, c. 350 B.C.E., the sculpture pivots at the shoulders and hips into an S-Curve and stands with her right hand over her genitals in a pudica (or modest Venus) pose. Exhibited in a circular temple and visible from all sides, the Aphrodite of Knidos became one of the most celebrated sculptures in all of antiquity.

By the end of the High Classical style, the development of Greek sculpture had been mainly uniform. Afterwards, because of the success of that style, even leading masters tended to look back to it – and its exemplary works, such as the Parthenon – as a sort of standard, repeating its formulas in varying degree, and making equally selective use of the innovations of their contemporaries. Since also there are few usefully dated originals or copies either, the history of the Late Classical style has not yet been worked out in convincing detail and historians disagree widely on the chronology and assessment of important pieces.

The High Classical tradition in Greek art remained dominant till the 370s BCE, sometimes fairly pure and sometimes in a mannered exaggeration, but later new trends asserted themselves more insistently. These trends were not ubiquitous nor were they all combined in any one work, but on the whole, their direction was towards a closer imitation of nature in the flesh, facial expression, drapery and pose, though the requirements of ideal art were not forgotten. The end of the Late Classical style is usually put at the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE, but the most significant changes may have occurred some thirty or forty years earlier and perhaps the conventional periods of Greek sculpture ought to be revised.