If you could visit a certain period of history to observe the art and artists, which era would you choose and why?  Hellenistic Period 323-30 BC.  A curious time period mingling  Western and Eastern ideas, religions, and arts.  It was the last centuries before Christ.  A great style, variety and complexity of Hellenistic culture called for an architecture on an imperial scale and mosaic were symbols of luxury.  These true mosaics, composed entirely of cut stones, as well as other antiquities of beauty can be seen in their sculptures. "Venus de Milo" was the felling for stone as stone had quite surrendered to the ambition of making stone feel soft, warm a mimic of the human body. This could only be obtained by an artist with brilliant technical facility working in the conviction that the business of the artist is to produce from stone a vision of beauty.

This alone is the true point of the being of the artist, for that vision of beauty was to be carried out through the ages to come.

While Alexander and his successors were Hellenizing the East, a power was rising in the western Mediterranean that, in its own way would, like Greece, Europeanized the world and in the one fateful year, 146 BC, a powerful Roman culture sacked the Greek culture.