In Egypt the role of painting was comparable to its role in prehistoric times in that the art was essentially a medium for the expression of concepts rather than a mere record of sensitory experience. As early as the period of the Old Kingdom, which began c.2700 b.c., painting was called upon to aid in creating the symbols of achievement and distinction that covered the walls of tombs with records of the ways in which their inhabitants had lived in mortal life. For the Egyptian, as for prehistoric man, painting was therefore a functional art, defining concepts of accepted social values rather than serving merely as a form of decoration; what appeals to modern eyes as decorative character in these paintings was the result of the artist's effort to make his pictorial statement as clear and intelligible as possible. Thus the symmetry of the six geese in the well-known frieze from a tomb excavated at Medum (the frieze is in the museum at Cairo) is a quality resulting from the painter's primary desire to state as clearly as possible the notable characteristics of the birds, to which the purely formal relationship of equal balance is only incidental.

The conventions found in the descriptively conceptual painting of Egypt are similar in many respects to those of prehistoric art. Animals and other forms of subhuman organic nature are shown without exception in profile, in accordance with the earlier custom of reproducing the memory picture, and the infinitely more difficult problem of representing the human form is solved in much the same way. Since, however, the human body in its entirety does not lend itself to portrayal in a single characteristic profile, it is divided into various elements each of which is thus shown. The head appears in profile, but the eye is placed in it as if seen from directly in front. The shoulders, too, are represented frontally, while the hips and legs are portrayed as if seen from the side in the act of taking a step. It would not have occurred to an Egyptian artist to compare his picture of a man with what he saw in an actual living human, for he was concerned with the portrayal of concepts instead- of transient appearances, and the idioms expressing those concepts were so firmly established by ageold tradition that they were immutable.

Scale and space as pictorial elements were also conventionalized by the Egyptian artist. In the scenes on tomb and temple walls that show members of the noble and royal castes, these figures are always much larger in size than the figures of their commoner associates, for in no other way could the Egyptian convey so unmistakably their greater social importance. The diminishing size of objects as they are farther and farther away in pictured space-a result of applying the procedures of scientifically constructed perspective-is a phenomenon which the Egyptian artist could not have understood, since it would have involved a formal denial of all that he knew to be right as to relationships of character and social rank. Hence, distance is conventionalized in Egyptian painting as a series of levels or registers, with nearer objects being represented at the bottom of the painted area and more distant ones higher up.

As a technical process, painting in Egypt did not enjoy the same degree of self-sufficiency that it acquired in later times. It was usually employed as a supplement to sculptured relief. Often the carved stone was covered by a thin layer of smoothed plaster or stucco to which the color was applied. Sharp contour lines inclosing relatively flat areas of simple, unmodulated hues are the prevailing characteristics technically. The colors themselves are treated as conventionally as the forms. Most obvious of the color conventions is the use of a dark reddish-brown for the flesh of male figures and a lighter cream color for feminine figures.

Restricted as he was by conventions prescribed by age-old traditions, it is the more amazing that the characterization of many details of the Egyptian's paintings is so sharp and precise. The lurking malignance of a hunting cat about to spring upon an unsuspecting bird and the lithe suppleness of an acrobatic dancer's body, drawn probably as a moment's diversion upon a flake of limestone found in a painter's workshop, are expressive values that transcend the rigidly prescribed concepts with which the Egyptian artist was required to concern himself in his more monumental forms. They bespeak the unerring accuracy of observation upon which the dominating conventions were based and provide a clue to the question of how those conventions could have been maintained for a span of more than two millennia.

Mesopotamian Painting

Even more than in Egypt was painting a subordinate and accessory art in the area of another great pre-Hellenic culture of the eastern Mediterranean world, the culture of Mesopotamia. The paucity of evidence as to monumental painting in this region is a consequence, in large measure, of the almost total disintegration of the great mud-brick palaces whose walls may well have been ornamented in such fashion. From the earliest known eras in Mesopotamian history, however, there is substantial evidence of artistic activity in the form of decorated pottery, and the elaborate ornamentation of glazed tile found on the walls of monuments like the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, built about the year 570 B.C., is still further indication of a characteristic pictorial tradition in this region.

Aegean Painting

Painting was a significant art in the Aegean world, where, in the islands off the mainland of Greece, in Crete, and on the mainland itself, a brilliant culture was maintained from the fourth through the second millennium B.C. Painting in this region appears in the form of decorations for countless vases and jars and as murals in the great palaces, such as those at Knossos (Cnossos) and Phaistos in Crete and at Tiryns on the mainland. The ceramic ornaments are notable for the effective stylization of naturalistic motives drawn from floral and marine life. The mural paintings are not only finely designed ornamental adjuncts to the architectural elements of the walls they adorn; they are also a primary source of information concerning the ways of living of the fastidious and sophisticated Cretans and their more warlike mainland contemporaries. Great ceremonial processions form friezes that once decorated the corridors of King Minos' labyrinthine palace at Knossos, and fantastic griffons crouch as guardians beside the throne upon which the monarch sat while taking part in mysterious sacred rites. Here a group of women chatter idly as they witness some cultic celebration or an entertaining spectacle. Standing erect in a chariot, they go out to witness a boar hunt. All of the primitive conventions of representation appear in these Aegean murals, in patterns of black lines and brilliant colors. So vividly have the artists recorded events in which they themselves must often have participated that there is hardly a more lively and spirited record pf a culture in the whole history of painting.

Greek Painting

In the great cultural upheavals, one phase of which is interpreted in the Homeric poems, the Aegean world was overrun by recurrent waves of invaders from more northerly regions. From what might be termed the "Dark Ages," from the 11th through the 8th century B.C., there is only the most fragmentary evidence of any continuation of the artistic traditions of the earlier period. Insofar as painting is concerned, this evidence is largely in the form of decorated pottery-ceramic vessels on which the ornament was executed in accordance with technical procedures originated by potters of the Aegean period. The motives, however, were limited to purely geometric forms.

By the end of the 8th century this geometric style gives way to one that is more ambitious. Animal and human figures begin to make their appearance, executed in lustrous black glazes on a background of reddish brown that was the fired clay of the vessel itself. This black-figured method of vase painting prevailed until the later years of the 6th century B.C. Its practitioners included painters who signed their works. One of these was Klitias, who about 560 B.C. executed the ornament of a great mixing bowl, or crater, which is now in the Museo Archeologico in Florence, where it is known as the Francois Vase. Another was Exekias, among whose signed works are a drinking cup, or kylix, with a picture of Dionysos, the Greek god of wine (it is now in the museum at Munich), and an amphora, or storage vessel, on which the Homeric heroes Ajax and Achilles are shown playing a game of draughts. (It is now [1956] in the Vatican Museum.) Forms were executed in the blackfigured style by painting them in flat silhouette and incising the details on them later. The style retains many primitive or archaic features, such as the full-front eye in a profile head, but it is notable in general for the admirable consistency with which the painted forms are adjusted to the shapes of the vessel on which they are executed.

For all its decorative effectiveness, the black-figured style of vase painting was limited in its representative potentialities, so it was inevitable that in the evolution of the naturalistic ideal inherent in the Greek conception of significant form, it should give way to a more flexible technique. This makes its appearance around the year 530 B.c. and is the red-figured style, so called since the forms appear in the base color of the fired clay against backgrounds of black glaze. This latter material was used also to represent details in the forms, which were painted on with a brush instead of scratched in with a sharp implement, as in the black-figured process. The new procedure was clearly much less restrictive than the earlier one. Developing with a speed paralleled only by that of the sculptural evolution concurrent with it, the red-figured style had progressed by the middle of the 5th century B.C. to a point where quite varied naturalistic effects were successfully attempted-modeling by shading instead of by simple contours, rendering of anatomical details of the most minute character, foreshortening of objects in depth, and even the suggestion of threedimensional space. Names of painters aboundDouris, Euphronius, Euthymides, Makron-and many other individual styles can be identified even though their creators are anonymous and can be indicated only by association with the principal examples of their work. Such are the Kleophrades and Panaitios painters or the Master of the Berlin amphora.

Note should also be taken of a third technique of vase painting, the . white-ground style, which used a light background created by covering the vessel with a cream-colored glaze upon which the designs were executed in dark outlines. Though practiced as early as the 7th century B.C., the majority of known examples are of later periods and are preponderantly in the category of the funereal lekythoi (lecythoi)-slender jugs with long necks in which ceremonial oil was brought to the tomb as a gift to the dead.

It is hardly probable that the decoration of vases was the only form of painting known to the classical Greek world before the middle of the 5th century B.c., but it is not until then that Polygnotus appears, an artist commonly regarded in classic antiquity as the earliest of the great painters. From this it would appear that the mural paintings he executed were a form of the art not as extensively practiced before his time as afterwards; and while no examples of his painting are known to exist today-or, for that matter, of any other monumental painter of his time-the decline of vase painting as a creative art to the level of one that sought little more than adaptations or reductions of the larger schemes of murals is negative evidence of the shift in interest from the smaller to the larger forms that occurred in the latter part of the 5th century B.C. Apart from such miniature versions of mural compositions as the vase painters were able to execute, the major indication as to the nature of classical monumental painting is in literary sources. Pliny the Elder speaks of Polygnotus as a master of expression even though limited in colors to white, red, ocher, and black, and combinations thereof.

Literary sources indicate that, in general, there was present in the painting of this period a tendency toward naturalism of effect that in time was to produce the illusion of reality. The same trend is evident in the contemporary transformation of 5th and 4th century sculpture into the masterpieces of Praxiteles and Lysippus. Apollodorus in the 5th century made the first systematic study of the effects of light and shadow in painting, and his contemporary Zeuxis was much praised for a painting of grapes so realistic that birds were said to have come and pecked at it. That the monumental painters of the 4th century were not concerned solely with such trivialities is clear, however, in what is the best pictorial evidence of their style, the mosaic copy of the Battle of Alexander and Darius from an original by Philoxenus of the late 4th century B.c. How much of the original quality was lost in translating the work into the more limited medium of mosaic can only be guessed, but that its creator was easily conversant with a variety of illusionary devices is clear-modeling by shading, cast and reflected shadows, as well as highlights, are all found in a composition of great complexity, multiplicity of detail, and a considerable dramatic intensity.

Hellenistic and Roman Painting

Painting in the Hellenistic period, the epoch from the closing years of the 4th century B.C. to the middle of the 2d, continued the experiments in naturalism initiated in late classic times and extended them still further in scope. The numerous wall paintings found in houses excavated at Pompeii and Herculaneum, which had been buried under the erupting lava and ashes of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.n., constitute the major material for the study and characterization of the era, but it is probable that many panel or easel pictures no longer extant were also executed at this time. The reason for the great interest in painting in the Hellenistic period is not far to seek. Only in a medium of such flexibility and limitless possibilities of illusionary representation could the complex and involved world outlook of such a mannered and sophisticated period be embodied. Light and shadow, the effects of atmospheric depth upon form and color, even elementary observation of what seems to be the diminishing size of objects viewed at greater and greater distances, all these are found in the Pompeiian frescoes. It is also characteristic of such an eclectic period that a considerable proportion of its pictorial output should have been copies of older works that were particularly admired; one of these, the mosaic of the Battle of Alexander and Darius, was found in a house in Pompeii.