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| Jost Amman Medea with Dragons 1578 woodcut Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig |
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| Anonymous German Artist Mermaid bearing Coat of Arms ca. 1560 drawing Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden |
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| Anonymous German Artist Mythical Sea Creatures Battling 17th century drawing Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden |
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| Anonymous Artist after Parmigianino Jason with the Golden Fleece ca. 1590 woodcut Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna |
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| Anonymous Ferrarese Artist Theseus abandoning Ariadne ca. 1540 oil on panel Alte Pinakothek, Munich |
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| Nicolaes Berchem Death of Dido 1678 oil on canvas Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna |
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| Anonymous European Artist Bacchanal 17th century oil on canvas Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, Netherlands |
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| Anonymous French Artist Iphigénie en Tauride 17th century oil on canvas Musée des Beaux-Arts de Brest |
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| Charles Brocas Aristides (as described by Herodotus) 1806 oil on canvas Musée des Augustins de Toulouse |
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| attributed to Domenico Campagnola Bacchic Scene ca. 1520-25 drawing Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin |
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| Heinrich Friedrich Füger Mythological Scene ca. 1800 drawing Städel Museum, Frankfurt |
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| Tommaso Piroli Theseus with slain Minotaur (series, Antiquities of Herculaneum) 1789 etching Hamburger Kunsthalle |
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| Pierre Brébiette Amphitrite assisting Venus descending from Shell Chariot ca. 1640 engraving Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich |
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| Marco Carlone Mythological Figures ca. 1775-80 watercolor and gouache on paper (after antique wall painting from the Baths of Titus, Rome) Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna |
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| Laurent-Honoré Marqueste Perseus and Medusa 1875 plaster Musée des Augustins de Toulouse |
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| Rudolf Jettmar Liberation of Prometheus 1910 drawing Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna |
The Greek revolution deserves its fame. It is unique in the annals of mankind. This should be acknowledged even by those who side with Plato in their taste for the archaic and ritualistic. What makes it unique is precisely the directed efforts, the continued and systematic modifications of the schemata of conceptual art, till making was replaced by the matching of reality through the new skill of mimesis. We mistake the character of this skill if we speak of the imitation of nature. Nature cannot be imitated or "transcribed" without first being taken apart and put back together again. This is not the work of observation alone but rather of ceaseless experimentation. For here too, the term "observation" has tended to mislead rather than enlighten.
There is no reason to think Greek artists offered a more complete or more accurate visual inventory of the world than did the art of Egypt, Mesopotamia, or Crete. On the contrary, in these early cultures the schemata of animals and plants were often refined to an astounding degree. . . . After all, Greek art of the classical period concentrated on the portrayal of man almost to the exclusion of other motifs, and even in the portrayal of man it remained wedded to types. This does not apply only to the idealized type of physique which we all associate with Greek art. Even in the rendering of movement and drapery the repertoire of Greek sculpture and painting has turned out to be strangely limited. There are a restricted number of formulas for the rendering of figures standing, running, fighting, or falling, which Greek artists repeated with relatively slight variations over a long period of time. Perhaps if a census of such motifs were taken, the Greek vocabulary would be found to be not much larger than the Egyptian.
It is not even necessarily true that individual observations, such as the existence of shadows or of foreshortening, were never made by pre-Greek artists. There are certain striking examples of such observations in Mexican art that would refute [Heinrich] Shäfer's contention that all such departures from conceptual modes are directly dependent on the Greek revolution. But it was Shäfer himself who rightly pointed out that what is interesting in the isolated instances of such deviations, which can even be found in Egypt, is that they remained without consequence. They do not become part of the tradition to be improved and extended, as they do in Greece. On the contrary, one has the impression that they are accidents, random mutations, which are weeded out by a process of natural selection. . . . Maybe taboos played their part in this sorting-out process. But most of all, we may assume, tradition itself had this effect. Nothing succeeds like success, and nothing survives like survival. The very fact that certain images had survived for immeasurable periods must have appeared as a token of their magic potency.
– E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1960)