Jacques-Louis David on the Art of the Ancient Greeks
The painter Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) dominated French art from the late 1780s until 1815, when the defeat of Napoleon and the return of the Bourbon monarchy forced him to leave the country. He was a staunch believer in classicism, and his notion that artists needed to return to the work of the ancient Greeks and Romans for inspiration helped shape the notion of art for several generations.
Below is a bit of advice that he gave to his students.
I want to work in a pure Greek style. I feed my eyes on statues, I even have the intention of imitating some of them. The Greeks had no scruples about copying a composition, gesture, a type that had already been accepted and used. They put all their attention and all their art on perfecting an idea that had been already conceived. They thought, and they were right, that in the arts the way in which an idea is rendered, and manner in which it is expressed, is much more important than the idea itself. To give a body and a perfect form to one's thought this -- and only this -- is to be an artist.
Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii (1784)
Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Socrates (1787)