CHAPTER IV.

THE BLACK-FIGURED STYLE

Archaic art, the wonderful offspring of the contact of Greek

civilization with the East, exercises its charm to-day more than ever.

We have ceased to ascribe a unique saving grace to the classic period,

the period of full bloom, and to allow no independent value to the

preceding century except as an inevitable transitional phase. We love

these archaic works of sculpture and painting for their own sake, not in

spite of their crudities but just because of their unpolished hidden

vigour, because of the precious combination of their essential features.

The fetters of space, and the strong tradition of an ornamental early

period give them a monumental effect, which has nothing of mummified

stiffness but is kept ever fresh and youthful by an eminently

progressive spirit and an energetic endeavour to attain freedom. The

archaic style ‘with fresh boldness goes beyond its Oriental patterns, is

ever making fresh experiments, and thus exhibits constant change and

progress. It is always full of serious painstaking zeal, it is always

careful, takes honest trouble, is exactly methodical: the language which

it speaks always tells of inward cheerfulness and joy at the result of

effort, the effect produced by independent exertion. There is something

touching in the sight of archaic art with its child-like freshness, its

painstaking zeal, its reverence for tradition, and yet its bold

progressiveness. What a contrast to Oriental and Egyptian art, which are

fast bound in tradition: in the one the sweltering air of dull

coercion, in the other the fresh atmosphere of freedom’ (Furtwängler).

The history leading up to the origin of this style has become clear to

us by quarrying in different localities. We saw the vases lose their

peculiarly carpet-like appearance, the filling motives disappear, the

bands of animals and ornaments forfeit their independence and become a

subordinate member in the tectonic construction, we saw the world of

figures win its way out of ornamental compulsion to greater freedom and

extend over the vase. The 6th century, to the beginnings of which we

pursued the history of vases, knows only occasionally inserted rosettes,

or a lonely bud projecting into the field. Plant ornamentation becomes

true Greek ornament, abstract, tectonic, and when occasion demands, full

of life with its swing. Animal friezes retire to the foot or the

shoulder, are often incidentally treated as mere decorative accessories

or seized by quite unheraldic liveliness. The principal interest is

devoted to depicting man, his doings and goings on. The vase painter is

now more anxious than ever to narrate and depict; he finds ever less

satisfaction in ornamental composition. He is never tired of describing

hunting and warfare, wrestling and chariot-racing, the festal dance and

procession, but with greatest preference, remembering the purpose of his

vases, drinking and wild dancing. But also the heroes of past ages,

their bold exploits and strange adventures, are his constant theme. The

Homeric Epic, the tales of Herakles the mighty, the bold Perseus and

Bellerophon, had evoked pictorial representations even in the 7th

century; but now the full stream of the legendary treasury pours into

painting and gives an infinitely rich material to the joy of narration.

What the vase-painter makes of this material is never conceived in the

historical or archæological spirit, but breathes entirely the air of

his own time; often only the added names (which according to the new

feeling for space assume smaller dimensions) raise a genre scene into

one from myth. Moreover the Saga is only seldom re-shaped by inventive

brains. Types once invented pass on, go from workshop to workshop, from

one district to another, are abbreviated (p. 49), expanded,

conventionally repeated or filled with new life. Types may also cross;

there arise purely through art, contaminations of legend, which are

foreign to poetry. When a Corinthian painter unites the Embassy to

Achilles (Iliad IX) with the visit of Thetis, this has as little to do

with poetry, as when on Attic vases the birth of Athena is coupled with

the apotheosis of Herakles, or the slaying of Troilos is transferred to

Astyanax, or the entombment of the dead Sarpedon to Memnon. But

everything strange need not be misunderstanding on the artist’s part.

The vases supply us with a multitude of legendary motives and

variations, which we cannot find in literature, and are the faithful

reflex of the fluidity of Greek mythology, which, devoid of canon and

dogmatism, was in constant flux.

Olympos too, is subject to these vicissitudes. Its gods live a human

life among men, the only difference being that some representative

scenes give them a stiffer and more elaborate appearance than that of

ordinary mortals. In early times the divinity is chiefly betokened by

inscriptions and attributes. On the painting of the Corinthian Kleanthes

stood Poseidon with a fish in his hand beside Zeus in labour. Late

observers of this picture failed to understand this external

characterization of the sea-god, and saw an act of brotherly sympathy

with the god’s pains in this holding up of the tunny; and thus a great

deal beside must have appeared strange to them, _e.g._ Apollo with the

great lyre still bearded in the 7th century (Fig. 52), Herakles without

lion-skin (Fig. 64), the unarmed Athena, who only at the beginning of

the 6th century, in contrast with the Chigi vase (Fig. 37), the Aegina

bowl and the Gorgon lebes (p. 49), begins to express her bellicose

nature by attributes, and much besides.

The favourite god of the drinking vessels is the wine-god with cup and

vine. He makes Hephaistos drunk and leads him back to Olympos to

liberate Hera from the magic chair. The big-bellied dancers and purely

human creatures, who form his escort on Corinthian vases, in the first

third of the century are superseded by the Ionic horse-men, the Satyrs,

who become ever more closely associated with Dionysos, celebrate feasts

with the Maenads, never despise the gifts of their master, and make fair

nymphs pay for it. The half-bestial creature in whom ancient Greek fancy

vigorously incorporates man’s pleasure in wine and women with all its

comic effects, is quite the patron of archaic vase-painting.

That all these representations were developed by vase-painting alone is

more than improbable. That the Bacchic scenes of toping and dancing were

created on the actual vase, is most likely; but one is often enough

compelled to assume other sources. The fight of Herakles with the lion,

for instance, in its oldest form is the borrowing of an Oriental type,

which is composed for a tall rectangle, and is expanded by the

vase-painters for their purposes by filling figures, ‘spectators.’ The

gifted artist, who gave this heraldic type the more natural impress

which was regular in the older black-figured style, was perhaps a

vase-painter; the creator of the later black-figured type was certainly

not, for his horizontal group is certainly a fine invention but always

has to be adapted artificially to the vase surface. As with the

wrestling of Herakles, so it is with Theseus’ struggle with the

Minotaur. The same sort of extension occurs on a favourite subject of

older black-figured style, the quadriga in front view, whose horses

heraldically turn their heads sideways, whose helmeted warrior is in

front view while the unhelmeted driver is in profile. This type,

certainly invented for a square, is also known in bronze and stone

relief, and the question, in what technique it first appeared, will

scarcely be answered in favour of vase-painting. For a square, too, the

finely compact group of Herakles wrestling with Triton was first

composed, a theme common on Attic vases from the hydria of Timagoras

onwards; the older wrestling scheme, superseded by this type, in its

Herakles spread out before the eyes of the observer and kneeling as he

wrestles, still shows strong affinity with the Orientalizing frieze

compositions (p. 46), and is for vase decoration much more typical than

the later invention, which on vases always has a ‘borrowed’ effect. The

dependence of vase-painting on other techniques is finally evidenced by

the so-called ‘couplings’: the best-known instance is the combination of

the departure of Amphiaraos with the Funeral-games of Pelias on a

Corinthian (Fig. 66), an Attic and an Ionic vase, a combination which is

borrowed from an inlaid wooden chest of Corinthian workmanship at

Olympia (‘the chest of Kypselos’) or a prototype from which both were

derived.

After all this one will not hesitate to look for a strong reflex of the

great art of painting on the vases, alongside of the special property of

the vase-painter and typical ornamental figures equally common to all

art, or to picture to oneself wall-paintings or easel pictures, like the

birth of Athena by Kleanthes, after the fashion of the best

vase-paintings, which are least constrained by ornamental

considerations, or to reconstruct from the copies of vase-painters

compositions like the Destruction of Troy (Iliupersis), the Return of

Hephaistos, the Reception of Herakles into Olympos. One is particularly

impelled this way, when the vases give now shorter, now longer,

extracts from the same large composition; thus we have a reflection on

some dozen vases of Exekias and his successors of the fine

representation of the heroes Aias and Achilles surprised by the Trojans

while deeply absorbed in a game of draughts, and warned by Athena just

in time (Fig. 96). One cannot conceive of any difference of principle in

perspective, in the rendering of the body and the drapery, in the

spiritual content, between vase-painting and free painting; they both

are children of one time. Nor did the vase-painter feel any necessity to

alter the composition of his patterns. Only as he had to decorate framed

bands, the law of isocephalism was more binding for him than for the

great art. Hence his strong disinclination for “landscape,” which we

often meet with in Corinthian and Ionian pinakes and wall-painting, but

on the vases never, or only in palpable caricature; the painter who on a

hydria from Caere copied a seascape with the Rape of Europa, was obliged

to place beside the figure what looks like a mole-hill but is intended

for a mountain.

This limitation of the possibilities of composition by decorative

considerations was of hardly any importance. The wide gulf between free

painting and vase picture was conditioned in the first instance by

technique. It was that which gave its special effect to the

black-figured style and set its stamp upon it. We saw previously that

vase-painting, when it took over the silhouette style from the

decorative animal frieze, increased its distance from free painting,

under whose spell it had been for a good part of the 7th century, that

with the incised technique it took over, _e.g._ the circular drawing of

the eye, and with the new colouring entered decorative paths (pp. 38,

44, 49). Free painting drew with the brush on light ground, used black

and white very sparingly, more frequently red, blue, green, yellow and

brown; placed these colours side by side in simple harmonies, with very

little gradation and shading, but also sometimes, _e.g._ to represent

fire, used the smooth brush; rendered the men in reddish brown, women,

children, animals and objects in light colouring. With this

free-coloured effect the black-figured style was neither able nor

anxious to compete. Just like the Geometric, it is in its own fashion

again an ornamental style, which does not disown its predominantly

decorative character. The figure silhouettes serve it as ornaments to

fill a given space, which are in a certain equipoise of colour in

relation to the rest of the decoration and the black painted parts of

the vase; the incision stipulates a sharp delineation of types, the

imposed colour gives a parti-coloured effect. The coloured effect of the

vases is essentially defined by the clay, which now, in the developed

black-figured style, takes on a brilliant warm red upper surface, and by

the black glaze, which assumes a metallic lustre. The darker colouring

of the clay deprives the lighter parts of their effects by contrast, and

compels the painters to replace the contour-drawing of women, linen

garments, etc., gradually by laying on white colour, with which at first

the contour is simply filled; but afterwards more commonly black

underpainting is overlaid. With the transition to white, clear

silhouettes are also obtained, which set off against the background more

effectively than the old contour figures.

The advance in the preparation of the clay and glaze colour came about

on the Greek mainland. Tradition makes the Sicyonian Butades invent the

red colouring of the clay at Corinth, and thus gives the correct

indication. The Chalcidian and Attic workshops helped the new technique

to prevail; in the East it gradually gets the upper hand and forces the

Ionian manufactories to give up their favourite white ground and adapt

their technical freedom to the growing strictness of the western

system. Attica, which in the 6th century opens a dangerous rivalry in

Eastern and Western markets and finally wins the day, brings the process

to perfection. With the refinement of incised technique it puts an end

to the parti-coloured method still much affected by Corinthians and

Chalkidians, it clears away the big surfaces coloured red and white and

all colour in ornament and animal frieze, and helps the harmony of clay

and black to its purest and fullest effect.

With the disappearance of the old parti-coloured system the vases are

completely removed from the effect of free painting. For that we may be

grateful to fortune. For this refinement of the black-figured style

permitted the sensitive feeling of Greek artists for decoration to

satisfy the delight of narrating and describing along with the

ornamental traditions of the old style. They had no need, as had the old

Minoan vase-painters (p. 10), to shrink from borrowing figured scenes.

The recasting of types into the decorative silhouette style made it

possible for them to conjure on to the vases whatever touched their

hearts and delighted their eyes, and thus to transmit to us an infinite

variety of scenes, without which our knowledge of Greek legend, Greek

life and Greek art would have remained terribly scanty.

Corinth must lead off the history of this new style. The chief centre of

commerce and industry in the Peloponnese, the celebrated seat of a

flourishing ceramic industry and of an important school of painting, it

not only took the decisive step to the new technique, but even in its

red-clay phase had helped the designs to drive out animal decoration,

and composed, or at least introduced into vase-painting, numerous types,

which supply material to other workshops for a long time. The quadriga

in front view, which Chalcidian and Attic painters repeated so often and

which kept

[Illustration: PLATE XXXII.

Fig. 64. HERAKLES AND EURYTIOS; HORSEMEN: FROM A CORINTHIAN KRATER.

Fig. 65. CORINTHIAN KRATER.]

its decorative effect for almost a century, appears here for the first

time; the triangular scheme of two wrestlers seizing each other by the

arms and pressing head against head, which survived to the time of

Nikosthenes, was taken by the Amphiaraos krater (Fig. 66) from the

above-mentioned chest of Kypselos (p. 67); the nuptial procession of

Peleus and Thetis which we shall meet on the lebes of Sophilos and the

François-vase is prepared for in Corinthian vase-painting; and the

battle-scenes, rider-friezes and chariot-races, of which there was a

beginning in the Protocorinthian style, were most richly developed by

the Corinthians, and adopted by Chalkis and Athens often without any

essential improvement. Thus one may be sure, that a number of other

types, which are not represented in the selection that accident has

given us, started their victorious career from Corinth, and that the

lost great art of Corinth, the bronze industry of which we have

specimens and the richly-adorned chest of Kypselos described by

Pausanias supplied to the vase-painters a number of mythological

compositions, which influenced other manufactories. Unfortunately the

greater part of this rich treasure is lost to us. The loss is the more

to be lamented, as what we have shows us a fine inventive talent on the

part of the Corinthian artists and a magnificently free and easy

conception of life and legend. The Homeric poetry and the Epic inspired

by it, the lays of Peleus and Herakles, the ballad poetry now becoming

very fashionable, from which come _e.g._ the birth of Athena and

probably also the Return of Hephaistos to Olympos, are reflected on

these Corinthian vases in inimitably vivid and drastic fashion; and the

vase-painter also gives scenes from daily life, carouses, drunken men

who dance wildly with naked women, kitchen and winepress, riding and

driving, marching out to battle, and the wild mellay itself. It is

particularly on the kraters (Figs. 64-66) that we can trace how the

accumulating material gets space on the vases; animal decoration, in

which heraldic cocks are very popular, retires ever more to the reverse,

under the handles, into the base stripe, and also by preference is

replaced by lines of galloping riders, who form a lively decorative foil

to the mythological principal picture (Fig. 64). Meanwhile filling

ornament disappears. The flying bird over the rider (Fig. 65) renders

the same service as the rosette, nay a better; it transplants the scene

out of a decorative space into an actual one, the open country; and the

space-filling animals of the Amphiaraos vase, which are traditional (p.

40), are not intended merely any longer to enliven the vase surface but

the wall of the house, the floor and the air. Thus the liberation of the

field, for which Timonidas and his fellows paved the way, is attained.

With this goes hand in hand the liberation of figure-drawing from

ornamental constraint. The outspreading of the figure in the surface,

which is still strong in the 7th century, is toned down or ingeniously

given a motive, as with the kneeling warrior who fights backwards, and

does not disguise his connection with the old runner with bent knee. The

individualizing of men and animals carried forward by Timonidas now once

more makes big advances in human figures, horses and dogs.

We will select two of the kraters to give us an idea of the development

of the style. One, a Paris vase (Fig. 64), gives a special application

to a fine banqueting scene, by added names and the insertion of Iole, as

the visit paid by Herakles to Eurytios, king of Oichalia. The fair

daughter of the house stands with some indifference between the guest

and her brother; it is supposed to represent a legend, but is really

little more than a genre scene, as which it is hard to beat. The lively

conversation of the guests, the dogs tied to the sofa-legs waiting and

speculating on the chance of

[Illustration: PLATE XXXIII.

Fig. 66. DEPARTURE OF AMPHIARAOS: FROM A CORINTHIAN KRATER.]

bits falling from the table are masterly, and even the horses in the

supporting frieze, if out of proportion and inelegant, are the more

characteristic and living. The technique follows old tradition; the

flesh of Iole, tables and sofas, one dog, shields on the reverse, appear

in outline drawing. Such contours, also found sometimes where men’s

bodies left white set off those painted dark, unite to some extent, as

does the red colouring of the male countenance, the vase in its effect

with the great art.

On the other hand the Amphiaraos krater (Fig. 66), which gives up red

for male faces, and makes a point of covering the outline figures with a

layer of white, has become more decorative and black-figured. Its

pictures are not equal in execution to the invention, but come from

excellent models (p. 67). Between the colonnade and façade of the house,

which are in line like the tables in the Eurytios vase, the hero,

because of his oath, mounts his chariot to go with open eyes to the

death he forebodes; his angry look is directed to Eriphyle and the fatal

necklace in her hand. With raised hands the family takes leave, a

maid-servant gives the stirrup-cup to the charioteer. Foreboding evil,

the faithful Halimedes sits on the ground: his heart has evidently

bidden him to train up the boy Alkmaion to take vengeance on his mother.

The whole delight in narration, which in the exaggerated rendering of

the necklace strongly emphasizes the previous history, is as genuinely

archaic, as the mythological individualizing of an old type ‘The

warrior’s departure.’

The Amphiaraos krater is more developed than the Eurytios vase, not

merely in technique. The painter of the later vase, though not so gifted

as his colleague, draws more cleverly, and works with a set of types

before him, as the frieze of riders shows. The advance becomes plain in

the shape of the vase. The Eurytios krater encloses an almost uniformly

swelling cauldron between a lip ring which is very low and a foot which

spreads out in ample dimensions. From this round-bellied archaic shape

we pass to a later more defined and elegant one in the Amphiaraos

krater, which has a higher neck, a steeper and much less swelling body,

with its lower part running to a point, till finally the outline almost

resembles an inverted triangle and from the handles a rectangular or

curved bridge has to be built leading to the high rim (krater à

colonnette). The tendency to development, which we can read out of the

vase shapes, may be taken as a symbol of the history of style. For a

Greek vase was always something organic, as much so as a tree or animal.

Unfortunately, besides the large kraters with their numerous figures,

which were favourite articles of export, few vases are preserved. In the

scene on the Eurytios krater we get the lebes with stand, also the jug

and drinking cup (kylix), which exist in various extant specimens. The

kylix has an offset lip (as in Fig. 24), and often knobs on the handles,

the interior picture is framed by tongue pattern. Beside the necked

amphorae, which like the kraters seldom have any other ornament than

rays, shoulder tongues and neck rosettes, the similarly decorated

big-bellied amphorae continue, which like their Attic parallels (p. 51)

put human busts or animal representations of old and new style into the

figure panel. The three-handled water pitcher (hydria) has the type with

vaulted shoulder common in the older black-figured style, and adorns it

with spirals and maeanders. All these ornaments, to which may be added

the double lotus and palmette of the Eurytios krater and occasional net

and step patterns, partake of the solidity and variety of the style.

Strangely enough, the phase of the Corinthian style here described is

for us the end of the fabric; not one of these

[Illustration: PLATE XXXIV.

Fig. 67. CORINTHIAN PLATE.

Fig. 68. THE SLAYING OF TYPHON BY ZEUS: CHALKIDIAN HYDRIA.]

[Illustration: PLATE XXXV.

Fig. 69. CHALKIDIAN AMPHORA.]

vases can be dated below the first third of the 6th century. Corinthian

pottery has no share in the Eastern Herakles with the lion-skin, the

Amazons as Scythian women, the entry of the Satyrs, the rendering of

folds, the painted ground for white additions. One asks whether this

brilliant development could break off so abruptly, or if it is only

accident which has concealed from us its continuation. Both are

improbable. It looks rather as if, just as the Protocorinthian

manufactory had its continuation in the Corinthian, so the Corinthian

was carried on by the Chalkidian. For the vases denoted by their

inscriptions as Chalkidian form, at all events according to the present

state of our knowledge, a group covering a few decades, which is in

succession of time to the later Corinthian vases, and is most closely

connected with them by a series of detailed agreements. Not only do the

vase shapes consistently carry on Corinthian tendencies, but details of

decoration like the white neck rosettes filled with red, and the step

pattern (Figs. 68 and 69) continue; the Corinthian animal friezes with

rosettes, the heraldic cocks, with the serpents, the winged demon, the

riders with the space-filling birds (Fig. 69), the wrestlers scheme, the

grotesque dancers, the quadriga in front view are taken over; nay,

details of drawing, like the warrior’s head in front view, the round

outline of the edge of the short small chiton (Figs. 70 and 71), the red

spots on black clothes (Fig. 70), the sword sheath with the St. Andrew

crosses (Fig. 71), the devices on the shields are not conceivable

without their Corinthian predecessors; even the names of Corinthian

grotesque dancers pass over to the Chalkidian Satyrs.

Not a single Chalkidian vase has been found in Chalkis itself, nor even

in any part of the mother-country: all specimens preserved come from the

West. One might therefore assume that the fabric had its seat, not in

Chalkis itself, but in one of its colonies, and thus the powerful

Corinthian traditions in this pottery would be easily explained. The

West was dominated, as we saw, throughout the 7th century by Corinthian

exportation; and the colonies of Chalkis had always been provided by

friendly Corinth with clay vases. But the strong influence of the

Chalkidian manufactory on the Attic is in favour of Chalkis itself

having put an end to Corinthian production, or at any rate to Corinthian

exportation. Why and how, cannot be stated: perhaps the publication of

the many unpublished specimens will solve the riddle and clear up the

close relation of the Chalkidian ware to the group of the Phineus kylix

(Fig. 74).

From every point of view the Chalkidian vases give us a heightening of

the Corinthian, a great advance in the direction of a later period. Clay

and black now attain their highest perfection, the distribution of

colour is most delicately calculated; no longer is there so much use

made of white surfaces (under which there is regularly a wash of black);

especially we see no more of the arbitrary colour-contrast which did not

shrink from white colouring of the male. If the Corinthian style had

already aimed at metallic effect in the angular formation of the handles

and the curving of the handle-bridges of the krater, the Chalkidian

heightens these tendencies almost to faithful copying of metal vases,

and consistently develops the vase shapes to the highest, almost

over-refined elegance; the narrowing of the lower part of the body leads

to the insertion of a roll, which the painter picks out in red from the

black foot. Thus arise novel vase-shapes; the necked amphora (Fig. 69)

is elongated, its shoulder flattened, so that the body almost assumes

the shape of an egg; the krater gets steep sides, high neck, and

outward-bent handle bridges; out of the older hydria with arched

shoulder comes a later shape, which, in a specimen at Munich (Fig. 68)

exactly copies the addition of cast handles to a metal body; and

similarly the other shapes develop, the kylix with knobs on the handles,

the two-handled cup, the jug.

The same endeavour after elasticity and elegance prevails in the

distribution of the ornament over the vase, which was managed in a more

masterly way at Chalkis than elsewhere. Certainly the ornamentation is

based almost entirely on Corinthian foundations. The white dot-rosettes

filled with red on the black neck, the lotus and palmette on the ground

of the clay, tongues on the shoulder, and rays at the foot, the step

pattern under the chief frieze are of old tradition but pass through a

growing elaboration. As a new motive of decoration comes in the chain of

buds, which we know from the East: as a rule it occurs beneath the chief

band (Fig. 69), or hangs over the figure-field in place of the lotus and

palmette. The Ionic pattern is not exactly imitated in the process; the

swellings under the Chalkidian buds suggest roses rather than lotus. Out

of these buds, palmettes, and the tendrils uniting them, is formed the

fixed ornament, which generally serves as central motive to heraldic

animals and often develops into a wonderfully rich complex of lively

lines (Fig. 69). The proper place for this ornament is the centre of the

upper band, which recovers its importance, now that the shoulder is set

off more sharply in hydriae and necked amphorae, and as secondary field

for decoration is, like the reverse of vases, usually decorated in the

first instance with animals. On the shoulder-stripe the riders with the

space-filling birds tend to drive out the archaic scheme of decoration;

they flank the lotus and palmette cross and in later specimens, where

the horizontal shoulder is no longer dominant in the general view, they

pass from heraldic constraint to parade order, and are also occasionally

replaced by cleverly disposed dancers. The reverse of the vase also more

and more shakes off animal decoration and replaces it by ornamental

compositions, as by the heraldic quadriga or the heraldic riders.

Friezes of animals beneath the main scene (Fig. 68) become very rare.

However markedly the decoration of the vase departs from the old style,

yet in spite of that there is in contrast with the Corinthian style a

marked decorative invasion to be traced. The vases that have nothing but

animal decoration are numerous, and the rosette often asserts itself

again.

This decorative invasion, which is connected with the perfection of

technique and marked talent of the Chalkidian artizan, does not detract

in any way from the figure scenes. The latter preserve their old vigour

and power of observation, some masters even raise it to a most intense

elasticity, and breathe into the old types a new and vivid life, which

in union with the line technique and arrangement in space makes these

vases superior to most of the other black-figured pottery. How Herakles

on the London amphora (Fig. 70) unmercifully deals the death-blow to the

three-bodied Geryon, or on the similar Munich vase (Fig. 71) to Kyknos,

is brought before our eyes with unambiguous matter-of-fact and verve.

The chest of Kypselos had already thus represented Herakles’ fight with

Geryon, and the Chalkidian painter rests here, as often and especially

in his battle scenes, on Corinthian types. But his rendering is anything

but a borrowing, and bears witness to fresh and vigorous conception. The

‘Herakles and Kyknos’ is based on the old fighting scheme, which

represents a warrior with raised right arm assailing an opponent who

almost kneeling moves to the right but looks round; and so in effect

only combines the ‘duellist’ (p. 39) and the runner with bent knee. On

the Chalkidian picture the old ‘exigency of space’ type is hardly any

longer to be traced; everything has become

[Illustration: PLATE XXXVI.

Fig. 70.

HERAKLES AND GERYONEUS: FROM A CHALKIDIAN AMPHORA.]

[Illustration: Fig. 71. THE SLAYING OF KYKNOS BY HERAKLES: FROM A

CHALKIDIAN AMPHORA.]

expressive and characteristic. To be sure the contrast between the body

in front view and the legs in profile and the spreading over the surface

are still hardly toned down, but the thrust dealt with the right arm,

the clutch of the left, the foot pressed against the back of the

opponent’s knee are full of vigour, and the collapse of the bleeding son

of Ares, his prayer for mercy while he plucks the victor’s beard, the

dimmed eye with its pathos, the composition and the filling of the space

are very artistic.

This heightening of characteristic touches does not merely appear in

battle scenes, but also the intimate touches in many Corinthian subjects

are carried on. Even the Eurytios krater had succeeded in expressing the

horror which seizes Odysseus and Diomede at the sight of the suicide of

Aias. The feeling in this group is perhaps surpassed by an episode in a

Chalkidian battle-scene; where the intent care, with which Sthenelos

binds up the finger of the wounded Diomede, reminds one of the later

kylix of Sosias (Fig. 114); and when a Paris amphora enlarges the march

out to battle by a domestic scene of arming, early red-figured painting

is again anticipated.

The combination of this fresh and direct observation of nature with a

marked decorative talent unites Chalkidian with the Ionic art of the

islands. On Chalkidian soil, where a language with a strong Ionic

element was spoken, a close contact with eastern neighbours must be

assumed. It is not only the chain of buds on the vases that witnesses to

this contact. The Satyr, a hairy fat fellow, with marked horse-ears and

horse-tail, often with horse-hoofs, enters from the East in a form,

which meets us on the Phineus vase (Fig. 74). And when the Chalkidian

painter occasionally indicates the outline of the female back, where

previously the drapery falling straight down entirely concealed it, when

he furnishes his Geryon with wings and often equips Herakles with the

lion’s skin, in this, as in much besides, one cannot fail to see Eastern

influence. Whether the rendering of folds, the beginnings of which

appear on Chalkidian vases as elsewhere, has the same origin, is

doubtful.

The fabric in the Ionic islands which was in close reciprocal relation

with the Chalkidian, may be called the ‘Phineus’ fabric after its chief

product, till accident betrays to us its home. From the remains of

lettering on the Phineus kylix, it can only be said, that it was

produced in a place where Ionic was spoken, which cannot have been near

to Asia Minor. The style, more Eastern than Chalkidian, but different

from East Ionic in much, _e.g._ the circular drawing of the male eye,

and closely akin to Chalkidian, is probably of Cycladic origin. But a

connection of this pottery with one of the old Cycladic manufactories

(p. 52) is impossible. As little as the Chalkidian has it any previous

history; the few amphorae and kylikes that remain belong exactly to the

same short period of time, in which the Chalkidian vases were produced.

The amphorae are rather earlier than the Phineus vase, and often very

like the decorative earlier Chalkidian specimens. Chalkis seems to have

supplied to them the western technique, the vase-shape, the foot-ring,

and also to have supplied the patterns in many specimens for animal and

rider decoration. But the less severe construction of the vases, the

irregular division of the fields for figures, the preference for a dark

covering of the ground above the rays, the liberties in decoration, lead

us to more Eastern soil. The very chain of buds, luxuriant and hardly

stylized, which often covers the neck, shows the unpedantic and concrete

Ionic style, and the same playful carelessness appears, when the painter

is lavish with filling rosettes and buds, when he inserts into a

heraldic frieze of animals a complex of creatures furiously biting each

other, or puts

[Illustration: PLATE XXXVII.

Fig. 72. IONIC EYE KYLIX.

Fig. 73.

HEAD OF ATHENA, BETWEEN THE EYES OF AN IONIC KYLIX.]

between his favourite squatting sphinxes a fighting warrior, a couple of

dancers, or two running girls, when he composes heraldically the heads

of two processions of riders, and makes a combatant the central motive

of heraldic riders, when he invents animal combinations with a common

head. So it is no wonder if he makes into an effective motive of

decoration the apotropaic eyes popular in this phase of art, which we

know from Delian, Melian, and Rhodian vases of the 7th century (Fig.

57), if he often adds ears and nose, and fills the centre with an

arbitrarily chosen motive, a leaf or a human figure. The eyes are found

on the necks of amphorae, but very often as outside decoration of the

kylix, which in perfected specimens shows alike the height and the end

of this manufacture.

The wonderfully living and swelling outline of these delicate kylikes

(Fig. 72) may be taken as a symbol of the style of the figures, which is

absolutely remote from abstract dryness. It often enough adopts

Corinthian-Chalkidian types as models. The ‘Phineus’ painter did not

invent of himself the warrior with head in front view; the slaying of

Troilos goes back to an old Corinthian type; the pursuit of the mounted

Penthesileia introduces, it is true, a new Eastern Amazon type in place

of the old one (which is also used in this group), but is based on the

composition of a Corinthian battle picture. What the ‘Phineus’ painter

does with his models is always distinguished by individual and genuinely

Ionic life. On the group of amphorae a fine vigorous figure style

prevails, which on the kylikes has a finer and at the same time more

delicate development. The charming Athena (Fig. 73), who now appears in

armour, and whose shield-edge the painter for decorative reasons has

doubled, the Scythian who like the mounted Amazon is at home in East

Greece, the skipping Silenus, the dog in front view would not tell us

much of this kylix-style. But fortunately the painter of the Phineus

kylix surrounded the fine Silenus mask in the interior with a continuous

frieze, the lack of which a hundred contemporary vases could not

outweigh. The wall with the vine and the lion’s head plainly divides the

frieze into two scenes: evidently a magic well, which pours wine into

the cup of the delighted Satyr. A lion, a panther and two stags draw the

chariot of the Wine-god and his consort. On the legendary team a Satyr

is making mischief; two of his colleagues are quite diverted from their

duty by the sight of three nymphs, who are bathing at a spring in a

wood. A lion’s head as spout pours into a basin the water with which

they are laving themselves; their clothes they have already hung up. The

other picture shows the blind king Phineus, from whom the Harpies have

taken the food off the table, for which he is vainly feeling; the

valiant sons of Boreas pursue the impudent thieves through the air over

the sea.

All is living, original and drastic in its conception, as perhaps was

only possible for an Ionian. The movements of the Satyrs and the nude

maidens, the animals and plant-life are caught from nature, and this

study betrays itself in various details. The face of Phineus, still

painted red like that of the Satyrs, is drawn in front view, which we

have hitherto only found in the helmeted warrior’s head, the collar-bone

and chest muscles are rendered, the eyes of the Boreads are already much

reduced in scale. Especially important is the treatment of the drapery,

not to mention the linen chiton of Dionysos with its parallel lines

indicating the material, or the long red chitons of the women and the

curved outline of the shirts of the Boreads, or the garments of the

Harpies adorned with Ionic crosses and borders; important innovations

appear in the himatia, that of Phineus is divided into

[Illustration: PLATE XXXVIII.

Fig. 74.

PHINEUS; DIONYSOS: FRIEZE ROUND THE INTERIOR OF AN IONIC EYE KYLIX.

_From Furtwängler-Reichhold, Griechische Vasenmalerei._]

red and black stripes, those of Dionysos and the women show rendering of

folds. That the himation rather emphasizes than conceals the outline of

the back, is a true Ionic feature.

Beyond this stage, the ‘Phineus’ fabric cannot be traced. Generally the

Cycladic pottery of this period is hard to get hold of. We do not know

whether there were more factories on the islands, and some isolated but

allied specimens with more fully Ionic alphabet cannot yet be localized.

On the other hand, the ceramic history of the Greek East offers at least

some fixed points, though the transition from the old style has not yet

been cleared up. We were able to accompany the Rhodian-Naukratite and

the ‘Fikellura’ styles to the very threshold of the black-figured, but

here the thread seems to snap. Shallow bowls found in Egypt and South

Russia with bud decoration and black-figured interior designs, which

were imitated by the Attic Vurvá style, and amphorae with remains of the

old ornamentation and big isolated animal-silhouettes in the field,

perhaps represent the latest products of the Rhodian style. The

‘Fikellura’ style finds its continuation in a ware, which was certainly

produced in Klazomenai, perhaps also in several places at the same time,

and has come to light not only in the Ionian region and the colonies in

Egypt and the Black Sea, but also in Italy. The Klazomenian style has in

common with its predecessor not only a series of ornaments (tongues,

rays, late Rhodian garlands, continuous tendrils, rows of crescents,

friezes of leaves, ‘metope’ maeanders, buds in the field, scales over a

surface), but continues the old shape of amphora and has the same

preference for loose decoration: beside the vases adorned in bands, on

which the animal friezes are driven out of the chief band, it is very

fond of a field consisting of a reserved panel or running all round, and

of the decoration of the neck by means of an ornament, an animal head

or a human head. In the field it likes to put instead of the heraldic

pair a single animal, a sphinx before a standing man or upright branch,

an isolated palmette and lotus cross, which are in a measure constituent

parts of heraldic compositions, and shows the same freedom, going even

beyond that of the Phineus painter, when it makes isolated figures,

dancers, running girls, or men wearing mantles, the central motive of

its heraldic sphinxes or cocks, and when it puts a runner with bent knee

between two lions that turn away from him (Fig. 75). The palmette and

lotus-cross and the animal types differ from Western types; the

selection, too, is characteristic of the East. There is a special

preference for the Siren: this bird-woman is used surprisingly often

heraldically, and in rows to make a frieze. The female panther occurs as

well as the male; the grazing deer is a Rhodian legacy. The ostriches

show knowledge of Africa, the winged horses and boars connection with

Asiatic art. The Klazomenian style is particularly strong in the new

formation of fantastic beings, to which the near neighbourhood of the

East gave the impulse. The seahorse and the Triton were invented

somewhere in this area: to the ‘Fikellura’ man with the head of a hare

Klazomenai adds a being with a tail and a lion’s head among human

revellers, among dancing men and women appears suddenly the bearded

monster with the horse’s tail, the Satyr (Fig. 75).

The stock of types varies considerably from that of the West; this is

particularly clear in the scenes with human figures. Beside the pictures

of riders and battles, beside the few preserved legendary scenes, among

which the most important are the battles of Amazons, who here in the

East have become mounted Scythian women, the prominent place is taken by

scenes of drinking and dancing in the

[Illustration: PLATE XXXIX.

Fig. 75. SATYR AND MAENAD: KLAZOMENIAN VASE FROM KYME.

Fig. 76. NECK-DESIGN OF AN IONIC AMPHORA.]

manner of the Altenburg amphora (Fig. 63). The file principle, so potent

in the East Ionic animal frieze, strongly asserts itself in the dancing

maidens and the abandoned revellers: the oblique inclination forward,

which the Klazomenian painter often gives the intoxicated, and which is

very successfully preserved on an early Milesian relief in London,

emphasizes at the same time the decorative arrangement, and increases

the expressiveness, just as the eccentric movements of the dancers

equally well fill the space and mark the tone. For life, sensual and

everyday though often grotesque and brutal, is what these Ionian masters

give, even if they are only decorative artists or artizans, whatever it

may cost. So they succeed in nothing so well as women, satyrs and

animals. The maidens with their receding foreheads, almond-shaped and

often obliquely set eyes, and the little mouth somewhat drawn in below,

and the well-marked back contour, have an attractiveness even on the

most careless representations; the shaggy satyrs betray their equine

nature not merely in ear, tail and hoof; the robust strong-maned horses,

the female panthers with swelling breasts, the fighting cocks forgetting

their heraldic duties, all show nature very close at hand.

The history of this style, which must approximately extend over the

first half of the 6th century, can be to some extent followed. In the

beginning comes the conflict of the old Ionic and Western techniques,

the transition from the light slip to the reddish-yellow surface, and

the tendencies in ornamentation which still strongly remind one of

‘Fikellura.’ The silhouette style makes liberal use of white. Not only

with inherited aversion does it often replace incision by delicate lines

of paint, provide garments with white crosses, animals with white spots

and white belly-stripe, and ornaments with white details: in its earlier

period it also extends the white surfaces, which it still places on the

ground of the clay at times, from women and linen chitons to men, horses

and dogs, and becomes as parallel to the Corinthian style with this

contrast of colouring as with its wide-necked broad-bellied form of

amphora.

The latest wares of the colony of Daphne (abandoned in 560 B.C.) show

the transition to the rendering of folds of drapery, which takes the

place of the old parti-coloured surfaces in the group of vases which

took its rise about the middle of the century. In this later group, to

which a series of ‘lebetes’ with topers, satyrs, centaurs, and battle

scenes is an obvious introductory link, and which culminates in two

amphorae at Munich (Figs. 76 and 78) and one in Castle Ashby, there

enters into the old style varied, free and easy, broadly even laxly

rendered, a peculiar severity and discipline. The three chief specimens,

necked amphorae with the continuous scene preferred by the East, are

more defined and elastic in shape, more finished in shape and colour,

more ornamental and elaborate in the rendering of the figures, than was

the case with the earlier style. The conclusion which naturally suggests

itself, that this new spirit came from the West and the Chalkidian-Attic

region, is confirmed by the ornaments. Beside the Ionic looped and

plaited bands, leaf and bud friezes, and the continuous tendrils (Fig.

76), come the double rays, the Western palmette and lotus system; and

when the painter scatters animals among the ornaments (Fig. 76), he

follows old Ionic tradition, but the hare and the hedgehog with the

ostrich riders of the Castle Ashby amphora are of Corinthian origin

(Fig. 66). In the treatment of the figure, the meeting of Eastern vigour

and Western severity makes as charming an effect as the genuinely Ionic

and very decorative composition; the scene of a Munich amphora arranged

round a centre (Fig. 77) with the cunning Hermes, who creeping up on

[Illustration: PLATE XL.

Fig. 77. HERMES STEALS THE COW IO FROM THE GIANT ARGOS. FROM AN IONIC

AMPHORA.]

[Illustration: PLATE XLI.

Fig. 78. CENTAURS HUNTING: FROM THE SAME AMPHORA AS FIG. 77.]

tip-toe steals away the fair cow Io from the sleeping giant Argos, and

the picture of the Centaurs hunting on the reverse (Fig. 78) are full of

ornamental vigour and at the same time full of fresh observation. The

left hand of the giant shows a new study of nature compared with the

old-fashioned right of Hermes and left of the front Centaur; in the

giant the artist is struggling to represent the anatomy, and the mantle

of Hermes plainly falls in layers, in contrast with the absence of folds

in the chiton.

The new impetus, which even expressed itself in exportation to Italy,

could not save the Klazomenian manufactory from the preponderance of its

Attic rival; it is at the same time its end. Not that the East Ionic

decorative tendencies formed a blind alley; the combination with western

technique ensured its continued life. But Asia Minor, which at this time

fell into the hands of the Persians, was not a suitable soil for

continued production. Athens seized not only the exportation but the

entire production. The arrival at Athens of East Ionic artists is

reflected not merely in the names of the vase-painters. When on the jug

of Kolchos and the Attic vases, typical Eastern principles of

composition crop up, when Nikosthenes introduces an East Ionic shape of

amphora (Fig. 104), when the red-figured technique coming into existence

on Klazomenian sarcophagi conquers the Attic workshops, when on early

red-figure kylikes the same decorative tendencies which prevailed in the

East assert themselves, there can be no question of an extinction of

East Ionic art, but only of a re-birth in Athens, and a baptism with

Attic spirit.

About on a level with the Castle Ashby group is another East Ionic

class, also only known through export to Italy, the ‘Caeretan hydriae,’

so-called from the place where they were mostly found (amphorae and

kraters being also represented), which are usually attributed to South

East Ionia. The developed vase-shapes, the completed black figure

technique, which has a wash under the white and uses incision freely

even for outlines, and the decoration, which has got beyond the animal

style, make their late origin certain, and the agreement with Ephesian

sculpture of about 550 B.C., expressed in treatment of hair, converging

mantle folds and the graded edges of the drapery, clinches the matter.

When in spite of that these vases stick fast to the system of contrast

in colour, that agrees with an expressed preference for gay decoration

such as from the days of the Naukratis vases South East Ionia loved. The

‘Caeretan’ painter actually enhances this colour preference, in that he

varies the colour of the male body from black to dark red, bright yellow

and white and similarly alternates the colour of hair and clothes. He

gives the same motley effect to the ornamentation, which shows plainly

its descent from the old Rhodian in its broad lotus and palmette system,

its rosettes, hook-crosses, and spiral-crosses ornamenting the neck, and

also reveals East Ionic freedom in natural myrtle branches and

ivy-tendrils, in bucrania with festoons and in interspersed animals. The

animal world too, with its fallow deer, lions, griffins, winged horses,

and winged bulls, is characteristic of the East and the neighbourhood of

Asia. These animals have long ceased to play their heraldic part, though

on the reverse of the vase two may face each other in symmetrical

correspondence; they are rather by choice included in hunting scenes.

The traditional tendency finds a refuge, if anywhere, in the figure

scenes. In heraldic scenes of battle, in the horse-taming ‘runner with

bent knee,’ in Satyr and Nymph running to meet each other, it asserts

itself: but the living interest makes one forget the ornamental scheme.

Lively drastic description is the strong point of the ‘Caeretan’

painter. His broadly treated scenes of hunting, fighting, and wrestling,

the fine delineations

[Illustration: PLATE XLII.

Fig. 79. HERAKLES SLAYS BUSIRIS AND HIS FOLLOWERS: FROM A CÆRETAN

HYDRIA.

_From Furtwängler-Reichhold, Griechische Vasenmalerei._

Fig. 80. SPARTAN KYLIX.]

[Illustration: PLATE XLIII.

Fig. 81. HERAKLES BRINGS CERBERUS TO EURYSTHEUS: CÆRETAN HYDRIA.]

of Satyr life, of the Heraklean legend, of Hermes and his theft of the

kine, of the drunk and lame Hephaistos, of Europa carried by the bull

over the sea, leave nothing to be desired in the way of original

invention, healthy vigour, and naive vividness, and in their aversion to

the typical and abstract they are diametrically opposed to Attic

painting. The stocky, strong man Herakles with the curly hair who

dispatches the inhospitable Pharaoh, Busiris, and his cowardly throng

(Fig. 79), or who with the hound of hell frightens the Argive king into

a wine jar (Fig. 81), are cabinet pictures of vigorous humour. The local

colouring is also unmistakeable. The altar with volute profiles is an

East Ionic architectural shape, the knowledge of the Egyptian and black

races, of Egyptian priestly dress, of monkeys, can only have been

obtained in Africa; the origin of the Busiris legend is only conceivable

in the neighbourhood of the kingdom of the Pharaohs. Thus though the

Caeretan vases found a local continuation in Etruria, because of this

local colouring one cannot imagine them made by Ionian colonists in

Caere.

On the other hand one may assume origin on Etruscan soil for another

class of East Ionic style, only known from Etruria, called ‘Pontic,’ as

having been wrongly localized on the Black Sea. The Asiatic-Ionian

origin of the style is based on the vase shapes as on the choice,

technique, types and application of the ornamental and animal

decoration; and also the figures, the lines of Tritons and Nereids,

riders and Scythians, heralds and Centaurs, and the legendary scenes,

which are often under ornamental influence (Figs. 82 and 83) in

execution and application, point to the same source. The ‘Pontic’

painters actually enrich our knowledge of East Ionic decorative motives

by a series of combined lotus, palmettes, volutes, maeanders, by net

patterns, leaf-friezes, etc., by a plentiful selection of animals,

which includes the marine Centaur, with the Asiatic man-bull, and is

fond of lines of guinea-fowls. But on the whole the class is very

provincial and cannot be regarded as a clear source of evidence. It is

questionable, whether obstinate persistence in stripe decoration, only

reluctantly giving way to the picture field, would have been possible in

the mother-country well on in the 6th century. The style is visibly

departing further from its Greek starting point. Vases which represent

Lanuvian Juno (B.M. Cat. II. p. 66) or Etruscan winged demons, show in

subject what the style of itself betrays.

Two classes with scanty decoration, fixed as East Greek by many finds,

can only be named for completeness sake; one, the ‘Bucchero’ ware long

known in Etruria, which perhaps originated in Aeolis and which owes its

black lustre not to glaze colour but to impregnation with charcoal and

to polishing; the other, the ware with a great extension in South Asia

Minor and Italy, either unadorned, or only decorated with stripes, which

give important conclusions as to the development of vase-shapes.

The East Greek manner took the place of the Corinthian in Italy at the

beginning of the 7th century. This revolution is less connected with

importation than with the immigration of Ionic artists. But even the new

current is more and more open to the influence of the ever-spreading

Attic importation, which in the East and West not merely captures the

market but also forces production under its spell.

Before we pass to this victorious fabric, we must once more return to

Peloponnesus, to a fabric standing in isolation and of marked

peculiarity, the Spartan. Excavations at Sparta show the transition to

the black-figured style, such as took place elsewhere about the end of

the 7th century. Corinth seems to have set the example for this

transition;

[Illustration: PLATE XLIV.

Figs. 82 & 83. PARIS AND HIS HERD; PRIAM AND HERMES LEAD HERA, ATHENA

AND APHRODITE BEFORE PARIS: FROM A PONTIC AMPHORA.

_From Furtwängler-Reichhold, Griechische Vasenmalerei._]

at all events Corinthian elements, _e.g._ riders with birds for

space-filling in the black-figured style give this indication, though

the conservative retention of the white slip and the inconsistent

rendering of the male eye clearly distinguish it from Corinthian. It

becomes really tangible to us at the period, when exportation properly

begins, at a time which already puts a black wash under imposed white

and with the shapes takes us further along into the 6th century. The

ware for exportation, which spread far over the mainland to Naukratis

and Samos as well as to Etruria, has given us only a few big vases,

finely decorative works, which are very conservative in their adornment.

The earliest of them is a Paris ‘lebes’ with heraldically arranged

animal-frieze and a frieze of figures above it, in which pot-bellied

topers are placed between the Troilos story and a Centaur battle; two

volute kraters and two hydriae, by their shapes, cannot be much later.

Broad tongues adorn shoulder and foot, the rays are doubled, to

Geometric zig-zag and hooked bands are added upright arched friezes of

lotus and pomegranate, continuous branches, and the lotus and palmette

pattern; the animal friezes have types of their own and do not avoid the

processional order not ordinarily favoured in the West. Even the larger

vases found in actual Spartan sanctuaries are almost entirely decorative

and show little of the figure painting coming in so vigorously in other

manufactories.

A compensation for this is offered by the number of kylikes preserved,

which in the 6th century, as in East Ionia, Corinth and Athens, so also

in Sparta, gradually pass into the high-stemmed shape with offset rim

(Fig. 80). The outsides of these kylikes are adorned only in a few

earlier specimens with antithetic or processional animal friezes,

otherwise only with the simple or net-like pomegranate pattern, with

lotus leaves and rays; from the handles proceed palmettes on their

sides. The figures are entirely confined to the interior, which much

more commonly than in other manufactories, rises out of pure

ornamentation or animal decoration to free scenic representations. To be

sure this is often at the expense of the decorative effect. Most scenes

are anything but composed with a view to a round space, and the segments

under the line which marks the level of the ground, often very clumsily

filled with plant and animal ornamentation, the rosettes, filling

flowers, and birds dispersed without meaning about the scene, are always

clumsy old-fashioned compromises between representation and

space-filling. The stock of figures, with which the painter decorates

his interiors, usually more or less at random, is even in its rendering

helpless and antiquated; to make up it preserves its independence and

ease, its primitive solidity; the strong warriors, riders and hunters,

the men carousing with women, the musicians and drinkers, the girls

bathing in the river, are in subject and execution truly Spartan. Beside

the pictures from daily life comes mythology with pot-bellied dancers,

who have not yet, so far as we know, been superseded by Ionic Satyrs,

with Erotes crowning riders and drinkers, and various legendary scenes.

None of these kylix-pictures breathes the Spartan spirit, the spirit of

the lyric poetry of Sparta, so well as the Berlin vase with the carrying

home of fallen warriors, which is perhaps taken over from a continuous

frieze without any attempt to fit it into the circular field; but even

in this shape has the effect upon us of a funeral march of Kallinos or

Tyrtaios (Fig. 84). But in humorous descriptiveness the Arkesilas vase

(Fig. 85) takes the palm. It is a genre scene, but not this time from

the life of a Spartan citizen, but a travel reminiscence of a painter,

who once in African Cyrene looked on, while the silphion was weighed

under

[Illustration: PLATE XLV.

Fig. 84. RETURNING FROM BATTLE: FROM A SPARTAN KYLIX.]

[Illustration: PLATE XLVI.

Fig. 85. ARKESILAS OF CYRENE WATCHING THE LADING OF SILPHION: FROM A

SPARTAN KYLIX.]

the stern eye of Arkesilas, and stowed in the hold of a sailing ship to

be exported. The monkey too, which the painter puts on the yard, he

became acquainted with in Africa; the birds are not meaningless but fly

round the ship; only the lizard is an external addition, and we already

know it to be Corinthian. The life-like picture, which before the

decisive excavations in Sparta was regarded as chief proof of Cyrenaic

origin for this pottery, confirms the result of digging in the shape of

the chair legs, which agree with Spartan reliefs, and in the

inscription, only possible in Sparta. There is an approximate date given

too; for the king, whose portrait we have, reigned about the middle of

the 6th century. With this it agrees that his mantle is divided into

black and red stripes, which, as we saw in the Phineus kylix, comes

before the rendering of folds.

This conservative style does not show the same keenness as its

contemporaries in rendering folds and developing the knowledge of

anatomy; nor is the need felt for a long time of freeing the field from

filling ornaments or the base segment from animal decoration. The group

of vases which belongs to the second half of the century is especially

marked by the return of the white slip and of polychromy in the

ornamentation. It is only late that the Spartan painters turn to the

rendering of folds and richer body details, really only in a time of

decadence, which diminishes the foot, no longer colours the ornament,

and often avoids the base-segment. The occasional use of pale red

figures painted on a black ground with incised details can only be

explained as a provincial imitation of Attic red-figured technique, with

the superiority of which Sparta cannot even remotely compete. Similar

vases without any figures show the last output of the fabric.

The only fabric in which the black-figured style completed its life and

exhausted its possibilities, the only one which shows its living force

through the archaic and classic periods, is the Attic. Even at the end

of the 7th century it begins to vie with others. We already saw that

Vurvá vases were exported to East Ionia; the Gorgon lebes of the Louvre

comes from Italy. Etruria now becomes the chief place where Attic and

indeed all black-figured vases are found. The fact that ware made to be

exported to Etruria first gave us the knowledge of Greek vase-painting,

led enquiries on false tracks for a long time in localizing the fabrics,

and even to-day the word ‘vases’ reminds us of the decisive finds on

Italian soil.

The Attic manufactory is, as we saw, proved not only by the alphabet of

their inscriptions but also by continuous finds in Attica itself. To be

sure, the inequality of production in technique and style obtrudes

itself on us here more than elsewhere, and makes us take fabric in a

wider sense, as a complex of workshops, which turn out at the same time

good and rubbishy ware, traditional and progressive painting, vases with

light or dark-red clay. The Boeotian workshops, without doing them

injustice, we may class with Attic workshops of the second class; in the

6th century, in so far as they do not go on turning out their old bird

kylikes (p. 52), they are only provincial offshoots of Attic industrial

art. The same is the case with Eretria.

The inequality of Attic ware has yet other reasons. More than other

fabrics the Attic adopted foreign influences. Athens’ central position

between Corinth, Chalkis and the Cyclades, its relations to East Ionia,

led to a penetration of old Attic art traditions with other elements and

to the formation of a new style: the rise of trade and industry enticed

alien painters to settle at Athens, since foreign fabrics had more and

more to give in to Athenian superiority. Thus it is that Corinthian,

Chalkidian, ‘Phineus,’ East Ionic, occasionally even Spartan fabrics

[Illustration: PLATE XLVII.

Fig. 86. WEDDING OF PELEUS: FRAGMENTS OF A CAULDRON BY SOPHILOS.

Fig. 87. ATTIC TRIPOD-VASE.]

are reflected in the Attic pottery. These reflections give a very varied

air to Attic pottery, but on the other hand help to a dating of its

separate phases. After a period of Corinthian influence follows one with

a strong Chalkidian element, in the eye-kylikes the pattern of ‘Phineus’

ware is at work, while relations to East Ionic art run along side by

side.

The group, which one is inclined to make parallel with the red-clay

Corinthian, may be named the ‘Sophilos’ group from the fragments of a

‘lebes’ found on the Acropolis (Fig. 86). In contrast with its immediate

predecessor the Sophilos vase vies in motley effect with Corinthian

ware. Ornament is richly painted; himatia and borders are picked out in

colour, women and linen chitons have a white filling; in the red of the

male face and the varied colouring of the horses the system of

contrasted colours is as plainly exhibited as in the red colouring of

the male breast or of the whole male body on other contemporary vases.

The marriage of Peleus and Thetis is the subject, in a type repeated on

the François vase (Fig. 90), which we see developed on Corinthian

kraters, probably under the influence of the chest of Kypselos. Who

introduced into the scene the Muse in front view playing on the syrinx,

cannot be stated; the lower part of the body in profile is in marked

contrast with this bold front view; that it is of ornamental origin,

perhaps from a double Siren, might be suggested without its being too

venturesome.

The frieze is framed between a broad lotus and palmette pattern and a

stripe with large animals. Whether the filling ornament has been omitted

from the animal as well as from the figured frieze, in which nothing but

the big lettering reminds us of the old requirement of filling the

space, cannot be ascertained from this specimen; a second vase of the

same painter shows between the animals, which still suggest the Vurvá

style, isolated large rosettes, and other vases of this group make a

palmette flower or bud with stalk project into the field. These isolated

echoes of the old filling ornamentation, influenced by the East like the

gradually appearing friezes of buds and leaves (p. 83) disappear about

the middle of the century; but the animal friezes themselves live on

longer.

This survival of old decorative tendencies in a new shape appears still

more plainly in other vases of the “Sophilos” period. The amphorae,

which leave a “metope” unpainted to carry their figures or make the

figure field continuous, when they do not cover the whole body with

stripes, have like the Klazomenian on the neck a head, a lotus and

palmette cross, or a circle between zig-zags (the amphora which Dionysos

is dragging on the François vase is of this type), and prefer still to

decorate their stripes and fields with heraldically arranged animals.

The Ionic liberties too, the meaningless compositions, are not

infrequent, just as beside many Corinthian echoes in the friezes of

animals and riders, Ionic patterns often assert themselves in the

drawing and colouring of the animals, and in the shape and decoration of

the vases. The kraters and hydriae which are parallel with the

Corinthian, give the same impression. Of the smaller vases we may select

two hasty compositions, which cannot compare with the fine work of

Sophilos, but in their way help to enlarge our idea of the period. The

Munich tripod-vase (Fig. 87) in the stripe on the rim shows alongside of

the old animal composition two wrestlers of the Corinthian scheme and a

horse race from the same source, the succession of which is interrupted

by a fallen horse just as the animal friezes of contemporary vases

contain fighting animal groups; and a kantharos of Boeotian manufacture

and shape (Fig. 88) over the animal frieze introduces the wild dancers,

who as at Corinth, Chalkis and in East Ionia prepare the way for the

Satyrs.

[Illustration: PLATE XLVIII.

Fig. 88. BŒOTIAN KANTHAROS.

Fig. 89. ARRIVAL OF THESEUS’ SHIP AT DELOS: DETAIL OF THE FRANÇOIS VASE,

FIG. 90.

_From Furtwängler-Reichhold, Griechische Vasenmalerei._]

Just as we followed the process in late Corinthian and Chalkidian

workmanship, so in Athens the broad, massive archaic black-figured style

in the shape of the vase and the rendering of the figures passes into

more and more elegant compression and precision; Sophilos is followed by

Klitias. The Florence vase ‘made’ by the potter Ergotimos, ‘painted’ by

Klitias and named after its finder François (Figs. 89 and 90), even in

the boldly rising outline of the body shows the spirit of a new age, and

goes beyond the round-bellied shape of the Gorgon ‘lebes’ as much as the

late Corinthian kraters surpass the Eurytios vase (Fig. 64). Ergotimos

holds the mean between the old round-bellied vase shapes and the more

elegant ones of the Chalkidian best period (p. 77), just as Klitias does

between the figured style of Sophilos and that of Amasis (p. 105); and

as Ergotimos does his best in delicately moulding the shape and gives

the vase a showy appearance with his elongated handle volutes, so in the

figured decoration covering the whole surface and in the incredibly

delicate execution of all details Klitias presents a refinement of the

black-figured style which in its way cannot be surpassed. Potter and

painter here take a step, which secures for Attic pottery the paramount

position for all time.

The treatment of the procession of the Olympians in honour of the

newly-wedded sea-goddess on the principal frieze is particularly rich.

We have seen that Klitias here utilized an old type. The representative

solemnity required by the subject gives an archaic stamp to this frieze;

in particular the richly adorned festal clothes with patterns that it

almost requires a microscope to see, which bear witness to uncanny

patience and accuracy on the part of the painter, heighten the stiffly

venerable impression. But when compared with Sophilos, Klitias shows a

considerable advance in the rendering of nature.

For that we must not lay stress on the head of Dionysos in front view,

for the god’s mask-like appearance passed from cult into vase-painting;

but we may point to the diminished heaviness of the figures, the smaller

size of the eye, the division of the himatia into stripes, which here

and there converge like folds, and the reduction in size of the

inscriptions. The other friezes exhibit Klitias as a master of the

delineation of life and movement: the arrival of the ship of Theseus at

Delos (Fig. 89), the hunt of Meleager, the battle with the Centaurs, the

chariot-race, the return of Hephaistos, the adventure of Troilos, and

the delightful frieze on the foot with the battle of dwarfs and cranes;

even the heraldic animal frieze is seized by the same liveliness, for

between the heraldic sphinxes and griffins the animals, now treated in

quite an elegant and concise way, are attacking each other. How much of

these scenes is due to the inventiveness of Klitias and his direct

observation of nature cannot be made out. He has not got the rough

freshness and naturalism of the Ionic painters, but instead a marked

feeling for clear and speaking types; and generally speaking, discipline

and the gift of abstraction seem to have been more characteristic of the

Athenians than of the Ionians, who set more carelessly to work. Perhaps

Klitias got from eastern masters the interruption of the heraldry in the

animal frieze by fighting groups; and at any rate the Satyrs who

accompany the drunken Hephaistos come from the East into Attic pottery.

In the technique of the figures, the old style is worthily putting forth

its last efforts; the white is still put direct on the clay, the man’s

face is coloured red, black horse alternates with white. But with the

perfection of the clay and the black used in painting, and the minute

detail of incised lines, a new feeling for colour is brought in, which

leads away from the old motley effect; the masters of the

[Illustration: PLATE XLIX.

Fig. 90.

KRATER BY KLITIAS AND ERGOTIMOS: “THE FRANÇOIS VASE.”

_From Furtwängler-Reichhold, Griechische Vasenmalerei._]

François vase themselves in their later works go over to the new system,

which paints a ground for the white and gives up red in the male body, a

system which, perhaps, other less thorough artists had already set

going.

The chariot-race for a prize on the neck of the François vase introduces

us to an old and popular contest, which according to tradition

Pisistratus replaced by other games, when in 566 B.C. he reformed the

Panathenaea. At the same time he must have erected a new image of Athena

on the Acropolis, which, in opposition to the old conception, (p. 66)

still followed by the François vase, represented the goddess in full

armour. For on the prize vases, which were given to the victors full of

precious oil and labelled ‘one of the prizes from the city of Athens’

(τῶν Άθήνηθεν ἄθλων), Athena always appears as a fighting warrior, just

as the poet Stesichoros and paintings of the time of Sophilos had made

her leap from the head of Zeus. The oldest of these Panathenaic amphorae

(an idea of their shape is given by Fig. 101, a later specimen of about

520 B.C.) shows on the obverse the new type of Athena in the making, and

on the reverse the chariot-race which was now becoming infrequent. Since

this vase adheres closely to the Sophilos group in style and especially

in the animal decoration of the neck, but on the other hand already has

a painted ground for white, it will not be possible to move the François

vase and the transition to the later technique away from the sixties of

the 6th century.

The group of kraters, lebetes, hydriae, amphorae and other vases, which

immediately adheres to the François vase, usually, in so far as it is

not interrupted by marked individualities, is described by the

antiquated name ‘Tyrrhenian,’ derived from the finds in Etruria. The

conservative and often mechanical character of these vases does not

conceal the progressive elements. The vases assume the more slender

egg-shaped form known to us from Chalkis, the old neck ornament of the

amphorae (p. 96) is replaced by lotus and palmette. White colour is

regularly placed on black ground; Herakles is often equipped with the

lion’s skin; Athena with at any rate helmet and spear; in place of the

old-fashioned burlesque dancers and naked women come Satyrs and Maenads.

But of improvements in observation of nature this second-class group has

hardly any to show. It lives on the achievements of great masters, on

Corinthian traditions, and eastern influences. The frieze amphorae,

which continue alongside of the amphorae with picture field, vie with

the François vase in the accumulation of figured friezes; only in the

lower stripe they economize in figure scenes by using lines of lotus and

palmettes and animals. Thus their general appearance is still very like

the Vurvá vases, the Gorgon lebes and many vases of the Sophilos period.

The traditions of the 7th century end in this mechanical group; the

great masters of the second third of the century bring, perhaps from

Chalkis, new vase types and new kinds of decoration.

The transition may first be followed in the Kylix, which happily can be

traced in its development by many signed specimens. The firm of

Ergotimos produces a cup with knobbed handles and no set-off for the

rim, the interior picture of which is framed by tongue pattern, thus a

kylix of the type known to us from Corinth and Chalkis; on the outside

the Satyr is still loosely connected with drinkers of the old type, and

has thus not yet been associated with Dionysos and the Maenads. This

type of kylix shews marked Chalkidian influence, especially in later

specimens like that of Boston (Fig. 92), on which Circe (painted white

over black) hands to the companions of Odysseus the fatal potion and so

brings about her own abrupt end. Series of branches and buds, probably

also the dog in front view (p. 81)

[Illustration: PLATE L.

Fig. 91. ‘LITTLE MASTER’ KYLIX.

Fig. 92. ATTIC KYLIX WITH KNOB-HANDLES.]

and much in the style of the figures come from the neighbouring fabric.

This Chalkidian influence is to be traced on a second type of kylix

belonging to this period, that with off-set rim, (not the one in Circe’s

hand), which for a time carelessly draws its figures over the junction,

but finally makes a clean cut between handle frieze and rim ornament:

the rim is _e.g._ decorated with a branch or painted black, the handle

frieze bears figures or the artist’s signature in neat letters between

the palmettes proceeding from the handles. The masters of the François

vase themselves took this step forward; in Naukratis and the interior of

Asia Minor signed specimens have been found, speaking documents of the

popularity of the fine Attic ware in the East, which help to explain the

alteration of the Ionic style (p. 86).

The workshop of Ergotimos passed to his son Eucheiros (B.M. Cat. ii., p.

221), who, like the sons of Nearchos, Ergoteles and Tleson (B.M. Cat.

ii., p. 222) is found among the so-called ‘little masters,’ the makers

of dedicated high-stemmed cups, who, with special pride, and probably

also for decorative reasons, put their names on their products. More

than twenty makers’ names, among them those of Exekias, Pamphaios,

Charitaios, Hischylos, and Nikosthenes, have been handed down to us on

these vases, an important piece of evidence for the vigour of Attic

production in the generation after Klitias and Ergotimos. These masters

preserve the division between handle and rim stripes, even when the rim

is not marked off from the body. As with Klitias, the handle stripe

bears the master’s inscription or a drinking motto; in this case the

representation, consisting of neat miniature figures or a female head

drawn in fine outline, moves into the upper stripe (Fig. 91). Side by

side with that, the painting of the rim black and decoration of the

handle stripe with figures are very common. In the figures decorative

tendencies, betokening intention rather than convention, assert

themselves. The interior picture often consists of the Gorgon’s mask, or

a figure to fill the space to fit the circle; the outside often bears

meaningless compositions (heraldic animals, winged creatures, runners,

riders, men wrapped in cloaks), out of which develop scenes of hunting

and pursuit, chariot-races, and cock-fights; but also mythological

scenes and vigorous battle pictures with many figures occur. When such

scenes are still flanked by heraldic animals, in this case primitive

traditions are consciously retained.

On the Munich kylix (Fig. 91) the painter in the inscription praises the

beauty of Kalistanthe. More commonly fair boys are praised, a practice

which continues on vases for a century, the explanation being supplied

by the erotic scenes represented from the later time of Klitias. Those

celebrated are seldom to be regarded as the favourites of the

vase-painters themselves, but generally sons of the best society, for

whom there was a furore. This worship of beauty is of use to the

historian, for many of the _Kaloi_ are great persons with established

dates, and anyhow the common love-name puts all vases which bear it into

a short period of time; for the bloom of beauty lasts not more than a

decade.

If the kylikes of the ‘little masters’ last to the beginning of the

red-figured style (p. 109), the eye-cups go a good bit beyond this

limit. The type must have been brought to Athens from the ‘Phineus’

manufactory (p. 80) in the later period of the ‘little masters’; and

perhaps the Ionian Amasis, who has left a fine specimen with a figure

holding a branch between the eyes, had much to do with this

naturalization. Certainly the Attic artists never rival the swelling

shapes and vigorous life of their prototypes. With this type the outside

begins again to be treated as a decorative unit

[Illustration: PLATE LI.

Fig. 93. DIONYSOS: INTERIOR OF AN EYE KYLIX BY EXEKIAS.]

without division, an arrangement of which the red-figured style makes

almost exclusive use. The interior is generally not more richly

decorated than by the ‘little masters.’ When Exekias on one vase adorns

the whole interior surface with a wonderful idyll, the giver of the vine

in a sailing boat with dolphins leaping round him, this is quite an

exception (Fig. 93): that the ground is painted brick-red, is quite

unique.

The names Ergotimos and Klitias, Exekias and Amasis, Charitaios,

Pamphaios and Nikosthenes show that the manufacture of kylikes was by no

means a separate speciality, and that it may be simply due to accident

if certain firms producing larger vases do not recur among the ‘little

masters.’

The larger masterpieces naturally show the progress of the style much

more plainly than the conservative Tyrrhenian ware and the kylikes. We

noticed above, that single specimens, which stand out markedly from the

ordinary ware of the period, attach themselves to the François vase. The

master of a fine lebes from the Acropolis showing Ionic influence, who

occasionally still colours the male face red, probably emigrated from

the East like his contemporaries Kolchos and Lydos. Like Klitias, the

masters prefer to cover garments with rich patterns rather than to

render folds: they relieve the monotony of white chitons by vertical

strokes, and divide the surfaces of cloaks into stripes. This division

does not yet attain any effect of depth. But when Nearchos, the father

of two ‘little masters’ (pp. 101 and 112), divides the short male chiton

also by wavy lines into black and red stripes, he has already in his

mind the rendering of folds, and Kolchos grades the ends of cloaks with

clear folds. This emancipation from the old superficiality, which in the

period of the ‘little masters’ leads to the emergence of the ‘fold’

style in the works of Amasis and Exekias, must now be exhibited in a

selection of amphorae and hydriae in connection with the change of

vase-shapes and decoration.

We begin with the big-bellied amphora, which at the end of the 7th

century we saw reserve a square field and decorate it with horses’ or

women’s heads, and which in the period of Sophilos begins to put an

upper border of ornament on its figure-field, which is often adorned

with animals. Fine specimens of the Klitias period, which banish the

animal ornament into a lower frieze or give it up altogether, show an

obvious change in shape, in that the handles, instead of standing off

like ears, are drawn up perpendicularly, while the body of the vase is

to some degree tightened. Vases like that of Taleides with the slaying

of the Minotaur, or like the unsigned Iliupersis vase in Berlin (Fig.

94) with the gay alternate palmette pattern and the old heavy foot of

the François vase, belong to this class. On both vases standing figures

form an extension of an animated central group, but the Iliupersis

master makes a better whole of his triptych than Taleides, who merely

juxtaposes the heroes’ conflict and the spectators: alongside of the

furious Neoptolemos, who has already laid one Trojan low and is on the

point of despatching the aged king and his grandson with one blow,

Menelaos threatens his faithless wife, whom he has won back, while on

the other side Priam’s entreaties are supported by wife and daughter: a

picture rich in content, of true archaic vividness and talkativeness,

excellently drawn and composed. It is not only the way in which white is

used that takes one beyond the François vase; the rosette ornamentation

of the garments is quite typical of the following period (Fig. 92); the

wavy striping of the short chiton and the simple grading of the cloak

reminds us of Nearchos and Kolchos, and whether Klitias could have

characterized a dying man as well as our master is at least

[Illustration: PLATE LII.

Fig. 94. ILIUPERSIS: FROM AN ATTIC AMPHORA.]

[Illustration: PLATE LIII.

Fig. 95. SATYRS AT THE WINE-PRESS: FROM AN ATTIC AMPHORA.]

questionable.

The current of Chalkidian influence, which sets in vigorously about this

time, seizes also the body amphora. The arched foot becomes more

plate-like, a clay-ring unites it with the end of the body, which is

more taper; the Chalkidian wreath of buds (Fig. 71) for a time commonly

takes the place of the palmette and lotus band, which becomes scantier

and more monotonous, and as at Chalkis, a figure frieze (Fig. 95) may

occupy this space. The type belongs to the earlier ‘little master’

period. From Exekias, who was himself in his off-hours a ‘little

master,’ comes a specimen in the Louvre with the praise of the fair

Stesias, a youthful work of this worthy successor of Klitias, on which

Chalkidian patterns are very finely worked out, without the slightest

attempt at the rendering of folds.

The unsigned Würzburg amphora of Amasis (Fig. 95), like all the vases of

this master peculiar in shape and of perfect technique, is more

progressive and probably somewhat later than the Stesias amphora of

Exekias: the cloak of Dionysos on the obverse is laid in three folds; on

the reverse the shaggy satyrs, stylized in a quite un-Attic way, who to

the sound of the flute are gathering, pressing, and distributing into

jars the beloved gift of the god, show the same connection with the

‘Phineus’ factory as the eye kylix (p. 102). The technical perfection

and the fine decorative effect of Amasis’ vases are only surpassed by a

wonderful contemporary group, which is usually called the ‘affected’

class, because it consciously sacrifices the living representation of

the figure world to the ornamental general effect.

The over-elegant works of Exekias, the ‘affected’ vases, the minute

‘little master’ kylikes represent the last refinement of the silhouette

style, its last trump-card. The future belonged not to the masters of

the adorned surface, but to the delineators of the surface in movement.

In the last phase of the body amphora prior to the red-figured style, in

which the band-like handles and the narrower neck are drawn higher and

the stiff palmette pattern becomes canonical, Exekias in his riper

development passes over to rich rendering of folds; on the harmonious

amphora in Rome, which no longer praises Stesias but Onetorides (Fig.

96) he exhibits in the cloaks of the players the last possibilities of

his subtle technique with an almost incredible devotion to detail, but

even these fine clothes have their edges overlapping, and on the reverse

of the vase, besides foldless patterned clothes, appear cloaks richly

animated with folds. The amphora must be of the same period as the eye

kylix (Fig. 93); not only the feeling as a whole but the dark-red

chitons in layers on the outside point to the late activity of the

master.

The necked amphorae complete our idea of the two great masters. The old

heavy shapes with the arched foot take up Chalkidian influences and go

through the same processes of change, which we know from Chalkis. The

old-fashioned decoration with animal stripes is retained by the

Tyrrhenian vases, that with continuous pictorial field by the ‘affected’

group for a time, till the later Chalkidian type conquers the whole

field (Fig. 69). Amasis seems not merely to have introduced it into

Athens but also to have created the pretty variation with the flat

shoulder with a rectangular turn and the wide handles running out below

into tendrils: for these continuous tendrils are old property of his

eastern home. The handle ornament separates off the pictures on the two

sides and liberates the figures from the constraints of a frieze. The

Paris amphora with Dionysos and the interesting group of embracing

Maenads (Fig. 98) is closely connected with the Würzburg amphora (Fig.

95) not only by the double rays, which Amasis loves,

[Illustration: PLATE LIV.

Fig. 96. ACHILLES AND AIAS PLAYING AT DRAUGHTS: FROM AN AMPHORA BY

EXEKIAS.

Fig. 97. ATTIC NECKED AMPHORA WITH SATYR-MASK.]

[Illustration: PLATE LV.

Fig. 98.

NECKED AMPHORA WITH THE SIGNATURE OF THE POTTER AMASIS.

Fig. 99. DETAIL FROM THE INTERIOR OF A CAULDRON BY EXEKIAS.]

by the grouping, which in the other vase is transferred without change

to satyrs, by the beginning of himation folds, but also by many details

of the very individual style. The aversion to white colour is

interesting. On both vases the linen chiton of the god is left black;

the Paris maenads are rendered in outline only: it is but seldom that

the reaction against the old parti-coloured scheme goes so far.

Parallels are provided by the Athena of Kolchos’ jug and the girl-busts

of the ‘little masters’ (Fig. 91). Both the other amphorae of Amasis are

more advanced. The shape of the vase is slimmer, the decoration simpler,

the relation of figures to space freer. The bodies are no longer the

thick-set broad-thighed type of the older style: the eye plays no longer

so prominent a part. The short chiton is not merely laid in black and

red layers but even provided with a quite naturally waving border: the

artist thus far surpasses the standard of Exekias and even of early

red-figured masters. He need not on that account be put very late, for

the simple Ionic masters of the Caeretan hydriae, perhaps his

countrymen, made this border before him. This Ionism is in favour of

Amasis, who signs only as potter, having himself painted all his vases,

and having played the pioneer not only in vase shapes and decoration but

also in figure style. Exekias (in whose works the unity of the whole is

often expressly emphasized by the inscription ‘made and painted me’)

does not attack the problem of folds so boldly. Even on the two fine

necked amphorae, which praise the favourite of his later period, as a

good Athenian he lays the drapery in neatly-ironed layers.

The slender Munich necked amphora (Fig. 97) goes still further beyond

the Chalkidian models (Fig. 69). The neck ornament connects it with the

late works of Exekias, the eye decoration with the kylix type of the

same time, and even the space-filling vine-tendrils, which perhaps

Amasis introduced from the ‘Phineus’ factory into Attic painting, are a

favourite motive in later times. The satyr mask, like the Dionysos mask,

probably passed from cult into decorative painting; if Klitias

represents Dionysos, and Amasis the satyr, with head in front view, the

influence of these masks is not to be mistaken.

We have not yet named the most productive amphora painter. Nikosthenes

supplied some fine examples of the method of Amasis, some of which like

the Exekias lebes (Fig. 99) on the body of the vase help the fine black

colour to exclusive possession; besides a quantity of notably metallic

amphorae with band handles, the production of which in quantities seems

to be his speciality, though other masters adopted and modified the

shape (Fig. 104). The often very hasty and conservative decoration of

these vases cannot come from one painter. Nikosthenes, of whom almost a

hundred signed vases are extant (kraters, ‘Amasis’ and ‘Nikosthenes’

amphorae, ‘little master’ kylikes, eye kylikes, neatly painted jugs with

white ground, and red-figured vases) must have employed a series of

painters. The only one who gives his name, Epiktetos, we shall hear of

later.

The hydria too, which often shows its use in pretty fountain scenes

(Fig. 106), alters its form. As in Chalkis (p. 76) the egg-shaped type

of the Klitias period, shown _e.g._ on the Troilos frieze of the

François vase, gradually gives way to the later type with picture field

and horizontal, separately adorned shoulder. Timagoras, a contemporary

of Exekias, still prefers a broad-bellied shape and does not form handle

and foot as elegantly as Pamphaios. His Paris vase with the later type

of the contest with Triton (p. 67), on which he still paints the

monster’s face red for colour contrast, is very important for chronology

by a declaration of love for

[Illustration: PLATE LVI.

Fig. 100. FROM A LATE ATTIC BLACK-FIGURED HYDRIA.]

Andokides, a young colleague and later chief master of the early

red-figured style. If Timagoras is the predecessor of Andokides,

Pamphaios is his rival. His slim London hydria with the slightly bent up

handles, on which the vine of Dionysos overgrows the whole picture, and

the dark-red striping of the cloak assumes pure fold-character, falls

into the red-figured period, which after the second third of the century

begins to compete with the old technique, and to which Pamphaios himself

opens his workshop. The new style did not abruptly drive out the old:

from the time of its predominance perhaps more black-figured vases are

preserved than from the preceding period. In the leading studios for a

time both techniques were practised side by side, often by the same

painters. The balance inclined quickly to the side of the style which

painted the background and not the figure, and after the transitional

time of Andokides and Pamphaios only inferior talents experiment in the

old silhouette style. But though driven out of the leading position,

this old style was still busy and productive at least to the beginning

of the 5th century: especially necked amphorae and hydriae, which the

new style did not zealously affect, keep the tradition.

At this later date the shapes become elongated, the lotus and palmette

ornament loses colour, sweep and consistency. The hydriae bend their

handles more steeply upwards: the row of palmettes enclosed by tendrils

is preferred as framing ornament. The figures move more freely in the

space, and are also more hastily drawn; in particular the rendering of

folds becomes regular. The red stripes, which are painted quite

meaninglessly between the folds, no longer remind us that they once

indicated sewed parts of garments; white rosettes and red spots serve as

surface patterns, a red stroke as border. On the fine hydria in Berlin

(Fig. 100) probably of Euphronios’ time, which, it is true, is quite

unlike its class, the old round formation of the eye actually

approximates to the natural oval.

The links with the red-figured style, especially common love names like

Hipparchos, Pedieus, and Leagros, help us to date this style. Thus the

circumscribed row of palmettes seems to appear in the early Leagros

period (p. 114); the Berlin vase is thus moved to the end of the

century, like a group of pelikai with charming genre scenes and a series

of other vases of red-figured shape (p. 119).

In the new century the black-figured production gradually dies away.

Apart from the Panathenaic amphorae (p. 99) and other vases, which for

ritual reasons remain conservative, only trifling small ware keeps up

the old style. The prize vases can be followed as votive offerings on

the Acropolis, and in exported specimens down into the 4th century,

where they are dated to the year by archons’ names (one of 313 B.C. has

been found); even in late times they do not give up the old type of

Athena, but elongate it to agree with the slender proportions of the

vase, and combine other later features with the old picture.

In Boeotia black-figured painting, alongside of primitive attempts to

imitate Attic red-figured vases, continued as long in the burlesque

parodies of myth of the so-called ‘Kabirion’ vases; black painting on a

light ground is found in the early Hellenistic ‘Hadra vases’ made at

Alexandria, and similar late phenomena occur in various localities.

These late black-figured vases show real progress in nothing but the

development of a loose freely moving vegetable ornamentation: but this

progress depended on pure brush-technique, not on the old incised

style.

[Illustration: PLATE LVII.

Fig. 101. ATTIC VASE, LATE BLACK-FIGURED STYLE.

Fig. 102. PANATHENAIC AMPHORA.]