Style and the Development of Art Theory in Classical Greece and Early Imperial China

Abstract This essay analyses the circumstances under which Greek and Chinese thinkers and artists became aware of aesthetic response as an intellectual problem, and how their formulations of art theory were shaped by larger social and cultural contexts. Focussing on Greek art theoretical writings of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, and their Chinese counterparts of the Six Dynasties era (third to sixth centuries CE), it addresses what categories of actor wrote about visual arts; for what audiences they were writing; how their writing about visual art fitted into a broader range of cultural practices in which they engaged; what models of writing they emulated in developing written art theory; and how such writing informed stylistic transformations in Greek painting during the classical period, and in Chinese painting from the Han to the Tang.