For Greeks, perfection existed in the natural world, a world that had been created by the gods, who were themselves perfect and who had imbued the world with a harmony that was just and right. The world was in and of itself perfect, and the task of the artist was therefore not to improve on nature, not to try to make the world better (for it was already filled with beauty) but to attempt to capture and preserve the beauty that surrounded them. This basic philosophy informed all genres of Greek art during the classical era, and was especially evidence in Greek sculpture, which had the potential to be the most realistic of art forms because of its three-dimensionality and its scale.
Plato - and Aristotle, Plato's student, after him - discusses the essential purpose of art as a mirror held up to the real world in the Republic, for in this text he was fundamentally concerned with examining and explaining the ways in which the world and art about the world are related to each other. He argues that the true purpose of all art forms (including literature as well as the plastic arts) is a mimetic one. Art, in other words, should imitate life as closely as possible.
Plato argued - and hundreds of Greek artists followed this precept - that any deviation from imitation, from naturalism should be considered a flaw in a work of art, should be read as a lack of talent in the artist. This definition of art as the attempt to mimic life as nearly as possible emphasizes the importance of the artist's own skill and craft. We might consider it to be a highly limited function of art only to imitate what we might see before us in the real world, but classical Greek art compensated for the narrowly naturalistic definition by insisting that the artist who was capable of reproducing naturalistic effects should be celebrated for his (or her) talent. Aristotle would extend this argument: No artist, he would write, should ever try to create any work that wa...