Of the methods used in drawing and painting in Hellas little trace is left. Polugnotos and his contemporaries had produced idealised pictures, taking points from many beautiful men and women and uniting them to make one perfect man or woman. When Idealism gave way to Realism in Hellas, the change affected painting also. The artists tried to create a real illusion in their works, taking subjects like chairs or tables and making the spectator believe them to be real. They were helped by the developments of perspective and foreshortening, which were discovered at this time. It is against this exaggerated realism and the choice of homely subjects that Plato’s attack is directed: he hates such illusions as shams.[326] In the diatribes of the _Republic_ the possibility of idealised painting seems to be forgotten. Whether the boys in the art-schools also suffered by this change and were condemned to draw chairs and tables only cannot be decided.
The pupils, of course, did not have paper to draw and paint upon, nor was canvas employed. Ordinarily they used white wood, boxwood for preference, owing to its smoothness. Lead or charcoal would serve for drawing; for erasures, instead of india-rubber a sponge was used.[327] They may, perhaps, have practised on their wax tablets. One process was σκιαγραφία [skiagraphia] “shadow-drawing,” which produced rough sketches in light and shade: these seem to have been only intelligible when considered from a distance. Plato regarded them with distrust, as a sort of conjuring.[328]
In ordinary painting, which might be either watercolour or encaustic,[329] the first thing was to sketch in the outline (ὑπογράφειν, περιγραφή [hypographein, perigraphê]); the artist then filled in (ἀπεργάζεσθαι [apergazesthai]) the picture with his colours, with perpetual glances, now to the original, now to the copy, mixing his paints the while. Beginners would, no doubt, rub out (ἐξαλείφειν [exaleiphein]) frequently, and paint in again.
Aristotle,[330] in discussing artistic education, notices that it gave boys a good eye for appreciating art, and enabled them to exercise good taste in buying furniture, pottery, and other household requisites, which, to judge from the scanty relics, must have been masterpieces of beauty in the house of a cultivated Athenian. But still more important, it gave them “an eye for bodily beauty”:[331] which suggests that the human form, especially its proportions, formed the chief study of the art-schools. Proportion was the essence of Hellenic art; the great sculptors, as is well known, spent much time in drawing up a canon of perfect proportions for the human body. The boys may well have used their companions in the palaistrai for models, and the canons of physical proportion which they were taught by the art-master would serve to stimulate them with a desire to attain to such a perfection of body by their own athletic exercises.