THE GEOMETRIC STYLE
Now for the first time the history of Greek vases proper begins. In the
pottery of the geometric style are latent the forces, which we see
afterwards expanding in contact with the East, as well as the oldest
beginnings that we can trace of that brilliant continuous development,
which led to the proud heights of Klitias, Euphronios, Meidias. Its
producers may be unreservedly described as Greeks: Hellas has come into
being. However primitive the civilization of this early Greece may have
been, however patriarchal is the picture which Homer, the great genius
of this period, gives us of this world, however much the works of art
described by him point to Mycenean reminiscences and Phoenician
importation, yet in the department of ceramics the art of this time was
thoroughly original and highly developed, and it is from the vases that
this early phase gets its name.
We should like to have a glimpse of the origin of the Geometric style,
but its beginnings are shrouded in darkness. It cannot be regarded as
simply a descendant of the pre-Mycenean Geometric pottery, which in
outlying parts continued throughout the Bronze Age; for in its ‘varnish’
technique, its forms and decoration, it is totally different from those
primitive vessels. As little is it a direct continuation of the Mycenean
style, from which it took over the technique of painting. However much
towards the end of its development the latter inclined to decoration in
bands and the geometrizing of ornament, it was an outworn poor style
that arose out of schematizing of living forms, in complete contrast
with the clear concise Geometric style, which consistently unfolds and
exhausts its individuality.
Naturally the Mycenean style did not disappear abruptly from the face of
the earth, and there are transitional forms, which cannot be nicely
divided. They must not be too highly estimated; they are, it is true, at
the beginning of the new development, but do not influence it. Thus the
‘Salamis’ vases, and their parallels from Athens, Nauplia, and Assarlik
in Southern Asia Minor, show this transition, retaining in part Mycenean
forms like the stirrup vase, and Mycenean ornaments like the spiral, but
being in fact an insignificant ware, of bad workmanship and meagre
decoration. More interesting is the survival of Mycenean traditions in
Crete, the home of the Minoan style, and in the Argolid, the chief seat
of late Mycenean civilization: certain vase-shapes, hatched triangles,
concentric circles and semi-circles on the shoulder are retained from
the old style.
From these and other Mycenean reminiscences the unfolding of the new
style cannot be explained any more than by a revival of pre-Mycenean
Geometric styles. We must rather bring in, to explain the phenomenon,
those movements of peoples, the driving out of southern Mycenean
civilization by races advancing from the North, and the new mixture of
blood, which strengthened and made dominant the northern European
element. Though the Dorians did not develop the style as conspicuously
as other tribes, there arose out of the ferment caused by their
appearance on the scene the new creative vigour, the Greek element
proper, which, out of the frozen traditions of the mainland and the
lifeless relics of Mycenean art created a new style and a firm basis for
a fine development.
The Geometric style makes a virtue of the necessities of rude
beginnings; out of the simple decorative material at its disposal, it
creates a rich system. Angular patterns, rows of dots, strokes,
‘fish-bones,’ zig-zags, crosses, stars, hooked crosses, triangles,
rhombi, hook maeanders, maeanders broken up in different ways, maeander
systems, chequers, net patterns are most common; alongside of them are
circles and rosettes neatly made with the compass. The wavy line, which
like the snake edged with dots perhaps comes from Mycenean polyps, takes
a second place; all other free ornamentation is eschewed; the place of
continuous spirals is taken by circles connected by tangents. Thus the
ornamentation appears to be steeped in mathematics, and the same is the
case with the representation of living beings. Man and animal alike
appear in stylized silhouettes, which bring the various parts of the
body into the simplest possible scheme, and set them off sharply against
one another. Thus the human breast appears as an inverted triangle and
is shown frontally, but the legs and head are in profile. The head,
which is only emancipated from the silhouette style in the succeeding
period, already often has a space reserved in it to indicate the eye. As
a rule the human body is represented naked, while towards the end of the
period, the instances of clothing, especially of women, become more
numerous. There has been division of opinion as to whether this nudity
reproduces actual life. That is certainly not the case. “This is the
nudity of the primitive artist, of the abstract linear style. It is not
man as he actually is, but the concept ‘man’ which is to be rendered,
and clothes are no part of this concept.” (Furtwängler). These oldest
Greek representations of man are not, properly speaking, reproductions
of nature, but a kind of mathematical formulæ;, which gradually in the
course of centuries of fresh observation of
[Illustration: PLATE X.
Fig. 18. ATTIC GEOMETRIC AMPHORA (DIPYLON CLASS).
Fig. 19.
GEOMETRIC AMPHORA, PROBABLY ATTIC (BLACK DIPYLON CLASS).]
nature become richer, corporeal, living, spiritual. Animal
representation begins also in the same formulistic manner. The choice is
in contrast with the Minoan animal world: there is complete absence of
the Oriental animal world of fancy; we only see the Northern fauna;
horses, roes, goats, storks, geese. The animals stand upright, graze, or
rest with neck turned round. The technique is always that of the pure
silhouette; only the birds often, as in the pre-Mycenean and late
Mycenean styles (Figs. 4 and 15), show hatched or cross-hatched inner
drawing of the body.
These geometric ornaments and abstract silhouettes of men and animals
form the complete stock out of which the artist of the period provides
for the decoration of his vases. With them he fills the bands into which
he loves to divide the vase (Fig. 18); or at all events the shoulder or
handle band, constructively the most important, in which case he covers
the lower part of the vase with black (Fig. 19) or with parallel rings
(Fig. 23). The bands, the breadth of which is varied, are filled in two
ways. Either we have continuous ornaments, and processions of animals,
chorus dancers, warriors, chariots and horses, which in this style are
essentially nothing but ornament; or he divides the bands, and
particularly the handle bands (Fig. 19) vertically into rectangular
fields, metopes as they are called. The metope naturally takes a
different scheme of filling the space from the band; if the latter
prefers a continuous series, the former requires ornaments complete in
themselves, like circles and rosettes, or in the case of figures, the
antithetical group, the heraldic opposition of two different fields of
figures, or of two figures in the same field. The figures connected by
compulsion of space are then more closely united by a central motive,
and there arise ornamental compositions not at all drawn from actual
life, _e.g._ two birds both holding in their beaks a fish or a snake,
two horses with crossed fore-legs, rearing towards each other, tied to
a tripod, or held by a man with a bridle, two roes with raised fore-legs
leaning against a tree. Band and metope with their compulsory schematism
no longer suffice for the growing need of representation: in the large
vases the chief band is often made very high, or in the upper part of
the vase a rectangle adorned with ornament or figures is left out from
the surrounding black: thus arises the vase with special field for
subjects.
Legend, which in this period found its brilliant expression in the Epics
of Homer and Hesiod, is still very much in the background in these
vase-paintings. Centaurs only begin to be represented on late Geometric
vases. Scenes such as the embarkation on the bowl from Thebes (Fig. 21)
cannot be interpreted otherwise than mythically, as the rape of Helen by
Paris or of Ariadne by Theseus, since on Geometric bronze fibulæ from
Boeotia it is certain that legendary scenes are intended. The battle
scenes too, with their duellists surrounded by spectators and their
fights on a large scale by land and sea, must be inspired by the Heroic
Saga. But far more numerous are the scenes of daily life, which are
connected with the sepulchral purpose of the vases. We see the dead man
lying on the bed of state, covered with a big cloth; men, women, and
children, with arms raised to their heads in token of grief, are
standing, sitting and kneeling around him; we see the bier placed on the
hearse, and amid loud lamentation of the populace driven to the
cemetery, while, in honour of the deceased, chariot-races and mimic
battles are represented and dances are performed to the sound of flutes
and lyres.
As the human form is rendered without any feeling for bodily shape, so
all the representations are without any spatial sense. Chariot floors
and table surfaces are not fore-shortened, the breast of the dead man
lying on the bier
[Illustration: PLATE XI.
Fig. 20. UPPER HALF OF A DIPYLON GRAVE-VASE.
Fig. 21. ‘THE RAPE OF HELEN,’ ON A BOWL FROM THEBES.]
is represented in front view, the covering of the corpse is visible in
its complete extent, as if it hung down upon it; in the case of pairs of
horses the off horse is simply moved forward and represented smaller;
masses of men are rendered by files of similar figures; figures to be
thought of as in the background, _e.g._ the hinder rows in the Helen
bowl (Fig. 21) are placed high up. The space, which contains the
figures, is an ideal tectonic space, the surface of the vase to be
adorned. Where the figures do not suffice to fill this space, the
Geometric artist regards it as a gap in the decoration of the vase and
fills the void with dots, rows of zig-zags, hooked crosses, rosettes
with a central point, and actually paints birds or fishes between the
legs of horses or between the chariot and the bier which rests upon it
(Fig. 20).
This even covering of the surface gives the vases of this period a
carpet-like appearance, and this textile impression is strengthened by
the geometry of the ornamentation, by the angular stylization of the
living beings, by the decorative schemes and the division into bands.
But on this account to derive the whole style from the imitation of
works of the loom would be a mistake; the stylistic limitations of the
style cannot be identified straight off with the technical limitation of
weaving. As in all primitive civilizations so in the formation of the
Geometric vase style, simple linear patterns may have been taken over
from weaving and plaiting: but this is not the case with circles and
rosettes, and anyhow such a consistent and systematic perfection as that
of the Geometric vase style is inconceivable as an imitation of a
foreign technique.
Greek ceramic art never completely lost this ‘textile’ character, and
never quite renounced the Geometric school through which it passed,
though by centuries of labour it freed itself from the defects and
crudities of that school. Vase-figures long exhibit their origin out of
the ornamental silhouette; the decorative schemes of arrangement in rows
and of antithetic groups are always breaking out afresh; the principle
of using up the space is applied superficially for some time and only
gradually refined; the decoration in bands subsists for a long time
beside the vases with a pictorial field, and remains of it exist till
late; the disinclination for deepening the field, based on a correct
structural feeling, goes through the whole history of Greek vases and
keeps the ornamental figure world of the vases always at a distance from
the much less constrained world of free painting.
The Geometric vases have not merely a historical meaning, but a value of
their own. They are not a preliminary stage, but something complete. In
them Greek art in true Greek fashion worked out a thought; expressed
itself for the first time in a classical way, if the phrase may be used;
out of a clumsy rustic style with poor ornamentation developed vases of
technical perfection, compact and clear in form, consistently thought
out in the decoration now lavishly, now sparingly spread over them, in
their austere beauty true children of the Greek genius.
But this style did not put out everywhere equally fine flowers. It was
not, like the late Mycenean, an ‘imperial’ style, but, from the
first--and this is significant for Greek art--differentiated and
conditioned by locality; each region had its own manufacture of vases,
and its own Geometric style. Already the lead is taken by that place,
which later was to drive out of the field all competitors, viz., Athens.
The Dipylon vases--the name usually given to Attic Geometric vases from
the fact that most of them were found in the cemetery before the Dipylon
Gate,--rise in form, technique and decoration to the greatest perfection
and highest richness. In the magnificent amphoræ, as much as two metres
in height, which are worthy of their monumental use as tomb decoration,
the Geometric style perhaps reaches its culmination; in the so-called
black Dipylon vases, often only sparingly decorated on the shoulder or
neck and otherwise covered black, we get already an effect of colour
which became popular much later; the stock of forms is ampler, the
maeander more developed, the delight in telling a story and in
representing a scene greater than in other Geometric styles. Beside the
Dipylon there is a second site in Attica, Eleusis, though not so
important; Boeotia too must be mentioned, the pottery of which makes a
provincial impression, and is dependent in forms, patterns and subjects
on Attica and the Aegean islands, as also that of the neighbouring
Eretria in Euboea.
The prototypes of the big Boeotian and Eretrian amphoræ with high stem
and broad neck have been found particularly in Delos and Rheneia, richly
ornamented vases ‘de luxe,’ in which the painting is laid on a white
slip. In the same place, where the cult of Apollo had a great
attraction, several other Geometric classes were also found, among them
the precursors of the art which flourished in the 7th century and which
is usually ascribed to the island of Melos. On the Delian vases horses
and human representations occur, but generally in this class there is a
disinclination to represent figures. The same disinclination and the
frequent use of a light slip characterize the pottery of the Dorian
island of Thera, which developed a very definite though sober and
monotonous Geometric style that seems to have obstinately persisted till
well into the 7th century. The rich finds of other classes bear witness
to an active trade with the mainland, other Cyclades, and the Ionic
East, the pottery of which has many points of contact with the Cycladic.
We know it from Miletus and other places on the Asiatic coast, but above
all from the island of Rhodes. The Rhodian Geometric vases are
distinguished from the Cycladic by the absence of the light slip, and
seem in spite of many points of contact never to have reached the same
level. An isolated vegetable ornament, the so-called palm-tree, points
to relations with Cyprus. Cross-hatched rhombi and birds are very much
in vogue; they appear also in loose arrangement on the ‘Bird kylikes,’
which in post-Geometric times extended from Rhodes over the Ionian
region and so made their way to the Greek mainland, Italy and Sicily.
The most important Peloponnesian manufactures are: (1) that of Sparta,
which now to some extent adopts the white slip later predominant; (2)
that of Argos, which soon discards its Mycenean reminiscences and
develops on parallel lines with the Attic ware without attaining to the
heights and richness of the Dipylon vases; (3) above all, the so-called
Protocorinthian.
This Geometric style, which next to the Attic had the greatest future
before it, seems to be at home in the Northern Argolid (p. 34). Its
early Geometric beginnings we do not know. It is akin to its Argive
neighbour in many points, in the scantiness of its stock of forms, in
shapes like the metallic krater with a stirrup-handle. Unfortunately
little has been left to us of the large-sized vases, kraters, cauldrons,
amphoræ and jugs. The two-handled cup (Fig. 23), the round box, the
globular oil-flask, the deep drinking-cup, the jug with flat bottom
(Fig. 33) are the favourite smaller shapes. The limitation of the
decoration to the upper margin, and the decoration of the rest with
parallel stripes is characteristic. This ware was more exported than any
other Geometric class; it entered the southern Argolid, went by way of
Corinth and Eleusis to Boeotia and Delphi, and was exported to Aegina
and Thera, Italy and Sicily. On Italian soil, in the Euboean
[Illustration: PLATE XII.
Fig. 22. RHODIAN GEOMETRIC JUG.
Fig. 23. PROTOCORINTHIAN GEOMETRIC SKYPHOS.]
colony of Kyme, it certainly founded a branch factory, which quickly
took on a local character and exported in its turn; but in various other
places also the style evoked local imitations.
The Protocorinthian style owed its brilliant future both to the
Geometric foundation, and, as will appear, to the strong influence of
Cretan Art. In Crete, after the settlement of the Dorians in the island,
no definite Geometric style was formed: the Mycenean traditions were too
strong and the relations with the East too close. After the purely
Geometric vases, among which wide-bellied amphoræ without a neck are
common, there soon appear vases showing Cyprian influence, particularly
small jugs with concentric circles on the body (precursors of Fig. 27);
thus a pitcher from Kavusi, which by an exception has figures on it (a
charioteer and mourning women in a metope-like arrangement) is
apparently, in shape as well as in the ornament which consists of a row
of ‘S’s’ on their backs and the un-Geometric drawing of its silhouettes,
dependent on similar Cyprian models.
Crete with its loosely-rooted Geometric style took up the new elements
more freely than other localities, where at first they are placed side
by side with the native ones, like the palm-tree on Rhodian vases, the
Cyprian circles on Attic and Protocorinthian jugs, the precursors of the
tongue pattern on Attic and Theran vases, the unsystematic rays on Attic
and Protocorinthian ware, the running spiral probably borrowed from
metal work on Protocorinthian and Theran vases. Moreover, figured
representations from an alien world of ideas creep into the fixed
Geometric systems, as for instance the two lions devouring a man on a
Dipylon vase, the goddess flanked by two animals on a Boeotian amphora,
the fabulous creatures on Rhodian vases.
These foreign elements, which have their root in Oriental art, are the
harbingers of a complete revolution, and in them is heralded the end of
the Geometric style. It is obvious that a decorative style like the
Geometric could have no future: its possibilities were quickly
exhausted, even where the style was most richly developed. Its
dissolution would have come, even if superior civilization with richer
methods of decoration had not been in close contact of trade and
intercourse with this early Greek world, and exercised on it a
persistent influence. The Cretans and Eastern Greeks lived in the
immediate neighbourhood of Egypt and Asia, the islands and the mainland
were united to the East by active trade relations. In particular
Phoenician merchants, while the Geometric style was flourishing, handed
on to the Greeks the products of Oriental art, as both the Epic and the
finds testify. Nor did the Greeks remain at home either, but had long
become a seafaring people; Attic, Boeotian and Protocorinthian painters
proudly place representations of ships on Geometric vases; the
statistics of the finds of the various Geometric wares show a constantly
growing trade intercourse. Colonisation too has already begun, and is
ever expanding; according to the earliest vase finds Syracuse, Kyme, and
perhaps also Massilia and the Black Sea coast received settlers, while
their mother-cities still had Geometric pottery. Since Syracuse was
founded in the second half of the 8th century and its oldest graves
contain late Geometric vases, we obtain an approximate date for the end
of the Geometric style.
The objects of Oriental Art, which were brought before the eyes of the
Greeks by this active intercourse, powerfully stimulated their fancy.
The crowd of decorative motives from vegetation, the world of fantastic
animals, and the superiority of Oriental Art in the rendering of life,
drew Greek vase-painting out of Geometric uniformity and pointed it to
new paths.
[Illustration: PLATE XIII.
Fig. 24. ATTIC GEOMETRIC KYLIX.
Figs. 25 & 26. CRETAN JUGS IN THE FIRST ORIENTALISED STYLE.]