Account for the Centrality of Ancient Sculpture to the Canon of Art in Western Europe between the Renaissance and the Early Nineteenth Century

The sculptures of the Pantheon were often seen as the best examples of the 'high
classical style' Greek art. They consisted of one long frieze, several square panels and
two huge triangular compositions which were taken from the main temple of the
goddess Athene in Athens built c550 BCE. However the Pantheon marbles did not
arrive in the West until the first half of the nineteenth Century and although ancient
sculpture was central to the canon during the Renaissance, most examples were either
Roman copies of Greek works or Hellenistic.
Art theorist Giovanni Pietro Bellori (1615-96) made a significant contribution to the
development of the canon by looking closely at ancient sculpture and using it to apply
to modern standards of painting. His main point from the extracts of his book Lives of
the Modern Painters, Sculptors & Architects 1672 is that perfect beauty does not
exist in nature, therefore the realm of Ideas should be used to overcome natural
deformities and disproportion.…