Greek vase-painting (Griechische Vasenmalerei)

with drastic humour, is here refined and given a soul: even the Satyrs and Centaurs, the rugged monsters of the woods and mountains, are tamed by the new spirit which will not any longer endure brutality and obscenity.

The sleeping nymph Tragodia is not only correctly observed in her foreshortening, in movement and distribution of the weight of the body, she is also the vehicle of a wonderful feeling. The picture, which immediately prepares for the works of the Meidias painter and the ‘Pronomos’ master, and beside the great style of the Pelops and Giant vases shows us the continuance of the refined and elegant style, cannot have been produced long after Pheidias’ death.

The time of the School of Pheidias, of whose best works we have been introduced to a selection, gives us again a few artists’ names. The painter Aison gives us a Madrid kylix with the exploits of Theseus, which must be about contemporary with the Giant vase. On the Theseus of the interior the hair is dissolved into lively curls, which stand out dark on a lighter ground, and the plastic swelling of the belly goes to the utmost limit of what is possible; in his protectress Athena we see already the contrast between the leg that bears the weight and is covered by hanging folds, and the free leg, which is closely covered by the drapery; which is exaggerated by Aristophanes, whom the potter Erginos employed, just as is the hair with light under-painting, and the chiton clinging as if moist and blowing back. Aison, who began his activity even in Pheidian days, draws more elegantly than his younger colleague, but neither master initiated a new development of kylix painting. The greatness of both lay in exploiting as artizans accessible types.

With the works of Aristophanes we probably go further from the time of Pheidias than with the Naples fragment: the works of the ‘Meidias’ painter take us to the time of the Nike balustrade, i.e., the two last decades of the 5th century. They too are an echo of the art of the Parthenon pediments, but in travelling along the road this echo has lost its vigour. On the unsigned Adonis hydria in Florence (Fig. 152) all the figures exuberate in lazy grace and fine motives of beauty. Particularly the groups, Adonis in the lap of Aphrodite, and Hygieia with Paidia, remind us of the Parthenon, the wonderful melting forms of the ‘Fates’ and other pediment figures. But what there was born of passion, is here become fashion, and is playfully treated. The excitement of the faces with wide nostrils, the bowing and bending of bodies conscious of their beauty, the supporting of arms and play of fingers, the whole extent of the carelessly united society on the wavy hill-lines (p. 141) in spite of all its grace has something of the formula about it. The style of the drapery is certainly an indication of the weakening of earlier vigour. The many and over elegant broken-up folds, which cling unnaturally close to breast and free leg, the curling of the cloak folds, and the independent movement of the tips, is a long way off the Parthenon pediments, which inaugurate this enhancement of style, but without loss of vigour and by a kind of natural evolution. The effort for fine effect, which is expressed in the rich patterning, is in noticeable contrast to the restlessness of the drapery. A certain inclination to pomp is characteristic of the post-Pheidian style. The raised gilt details of the clay, which we know already on the white ground lekythoi (Fig. 134), the box of Megakles (Fig. 137) and the works of the Eretria master (p. 148), are now in high honour, and are plentifully employed on the Adonis vase.

The Meidias painter also produced a series of similar pure pictures of ‘existence’ on hydriae, e.g., the fair Phaon, the singer ‘Thamyris,’ Paris with the goddesses,

the Eleusinian deities, and decorated other vases also in this manner. These scenes, on which the figures move less vigorously than the lines, are more successfully rendered than the pathos of the scene of abduction on the London hydria signed by the potter Meidias. He was no bold progressive artist; his technically exquisite and very delicately drawn pictures recast in new shapes the new phenomena of art: in him the series of masters of the type of the ‘Sotades’ painter and the Eretria master comes to an end.

His contemporary, who may after the chief figure of the Satyric play vase at Naples be called the ‘Pronomos’ master, likes figures of ‘existence’ in pretty poses, but he draws them with more spirit and does more justice to the vehement style of his time. On the Naples vase, a showy volute-krater with rich profiling, he puts on the obverse the cast of an Attic theatrical performance in two almost equal rows one above the other, and thus starts a principle of composition which was taken up by the vase-painting of Lower Italy (Fig. 158). Liberal use is made of thinned colour, the centre of the scene is denoted by a white figure, the luxuriantly ornamented dresses confuse the general impression. In respect of shape and decoration one may speak of a decay of the finer tectonic sense, which reminds us surprisingly of the vases of Lower Italy. The perspective side-view of the footstool and of the tripod column are liberties taken by the great art, which generally Attic vase-painters consciously avoid so as to keep to the surface treatment.

The tripod-column, which transplants us into the Theatre of Athens, as the Athena of the Panathenaic vases to the Acropolis, recurs after Polygnotan times often in the midst of mythological scenes, and brings the vases, which show it, anyhow in relation to dramatic exhibitions.

It has been proposed to recognise the effect of the stage on vase-painting, e.g. in the increased pomp of the dresses. This effect might at the most have taken place indirectly; for that the vase-painters often took as their patterns votive paintings of victorious Choregi, is more than probable. And in general one may draw conclusions as to the great art from many a fine invention, which is seen on vase-paintings at second-hand, e.g. from the Bacchic scenes on the reverse of the ‘Pronomos’ vase. This conclusion is certainly also justified in view of the Talos vase (Fig. 153) which transforms the mighty echoes of the late Pheidian art into the pompous, as the Meidias vases into the ornamental-elegant. The vase-shape is closely allied to that of the ‘Pronomos’: the central figure in white, so popular in this period, recurs, and in its spatial effect is enhanced by shaded modelling far above the proportions of the other figures, which show plainly the conscious restraint of the vase-painters. Though the ‘Talos’ master altered the composition of his pattern to suit his vase, he must have preserved with tolerable faithfulness the grandiose invention of the centre group; the passionate impetus, which fills the whole scene and catches even the cloaked figures of the reverse, is here most convincing.

With this fine masterpiece, which almost exaggerates the element of show, not separated by more than two decades from the Parthenon pediment, we close the history of the vases that show the style of Pheidias. Nay, one may regard the proper history of Greek vase-painting as closed with these post-Pheidian vases. Not merely does the potter make his vases untectonic by excessive profiling and elaborate extension, but the painter too, interrupts the unity of the vase-surface with the white-painted and plastically modelled central figure; thus in a sense the silhouette style is declared bankrupt.

CHAPTER VII.

LATE OFFSHOOTS

WE should unnaturally shift the centre of gravity in our narrative if we treated the late period of Greek vase-painting with anything like the same fulness as its development from the Geometric to Meidias. The fully developed and often almost playfully treated vase-shapes give no longer any really tectonic ground for the silhouette style, which had exhausted the qualities compatible with its inward nature: the elegance of the vases feels the pictorial decoration to be a burden, as does the style of the figures feel the tectonic compulsion. Even in the last third of the 5th century examples are multiplied of the transition to free brush technique. The Pelops amphora (Fig. 148) adorns its black neck with a sphinx added in white, the Talos vase (Fig. 153) and with it a multitude of other vases seek to fix the impression by a white central figure, to which the others rendered in ordinary technique are only a pale foil. In the course of the 4th century this foil too, was dropped, and black glazed vases of elegant shape were decorated only with figures or ornaments loosely added in white. The brush technique, both the black of Boeotian vases (p. 110) and the white of Attic and Lower Italian, made a new development in ornamentation, which culminates in spiral tendrils and branches with depth of space, in combination of figures and foliage of plastic effect. Besides these freely decorated vases the red-figured long continue. But the centre of gravity of the manufacture lies no longer in Athens. Even in the time of Pheidias the Attic school sent a branch to Lower Italy, which took root in the Periclean colonies of Lucania, extended to various places in Lucania, Campania, Apulia, and Southern Etruria, and soon grew up as a strong plant. In this production, which in the 4th century completely supplanted Attic importation, few really original artists took part, who all seem to belong to the early period, and perhaps were emigrated Athenians; the master of the Paris ‘Tiresias’ krater is one of them. From the early group, in which good Attic tradition is strongly felt, we select two bell-kraters. The full, and rather empty heads, the very general conception of the divine types leave us no doubt as to the Italian origin of the Paris ‘Orestes’ vase found in Lucania (Fig. 156), while the wonderful group of the sleeping Erinyes, Klytemnestra urging them to vengeance, and the purified Orestes, show us not only a fine model but a clever hand. From the drawing and shape of the vase it may very well belong to the end of the 5th century, like the closely analogous London krater (Fig. 157). This vase with much humour introduces to us one of the favourite Italian farces (the Phlyakes) and begins a long series of similar representations from different workshops. Thus e.g. the painter Assteas painted two Phlyax vases, one of which in comic parody gives the violation by Aias of Kassandra, while the other is a serious theatrical scene, which with its detailed rendering of the stage clearly demonstrates the influence of the drama on vase-painting.

The activity of this painter, who from the stiff variety of the style and the localities of the finds must be localized in South Campania, belongs to a later phase, which does not concern us. For the more these Italo-Greek vases in shape, decoration and representation develop local peculiarities and depart from their purely Attic starting point, the less do they belong to our survey, which excludes provincial varieties. Out of the mass of Lower Italian vases of the 4th century, which in shape partly run parallel with the Attic,

partly develop noticeably baroque and locally limited peculiarities, which in their chiefly sepulchral representations, influenced by Orphic-Dionysiac cults, often fall into coarseness, stiffness, or effeminate insipidity, let us take only one example. The Boston volute krater, 1¼ metres high (Fig. 158) belongs to a group of Apulian grand vases, which elongate the shape of the Talos vase (Fig. 153) and add rich ornament in white colour. On the reverse bearers of offerings above one another in the favourite borrowed motives (sitting, standing, running, leaning on a pillar, drawing up one foot) surround a white-painted Heröon with the dead man: the obverse combines a similar building with a mythological scene, the slaying of Thersites by Achilles, and thus gives a mythical prototype to the dead man, for whose grave the vase is designed. The liberal use of white paint, the ‘black ground’ ornamentation of the neck and foot with branches and tendrils are progressive elements, which lead the way for Hellenistic products like the Apulian Gnathia vases; in the increased pathos of the faces is traced, though provincially coarsened, the stronger weight given to sentiment in the 4th century; and the perspective rendering of the building operating with light and shade, which often extends to the ornament, points to a period, which had won complete freedom in space, and certainly could distribute figures over the landscape more naturally than the vase-painter, who filled the tall space with them only in a superficially decorative way.

Sentiment and light, the great achievements of 4th century art, were the ruin of the decorative silhouette style, whose figure world can admit of pathos, as little as the bursting of its vase sides by perspective views corresponds to its surface decoration. Even in Athens, where out of the successors of the Meidias, Pronomos and Talos styles an after-bloom developed (Figs. 155 and 159), which from the rich exports in the Black Sea is usually called the Kerch style, the new tendencies of art were fatal to the red-figured style. To be sure this was in a different direction to Lower Italy. The figure world of the elegant Attic vases, which in the new naturalness of motives and drapery, in the strong emphasis on female forms, is far removed from the types of Pheidias, betrays little of the enhanced pathos of the great painting, which one would have to deduce from the sculpture of Skopas and Praxiteles, even if it were not expressly witnessed to by literary tradition. From the same finer decorative sense the Attic masters made no use of the full perspective of their time, and interrupted the vase-surface neither by buildings or ornaments drawn in perspective nor by composition in several planes, but following the old manner simply arranged above and beside each other on the surface their generally large and restful figures. As in the post-Pheidian style they like to pick out single figures by white colour, and do not despise gilded additions, nay, they even often heighten the decorative effect of colour by the application of light blue, green and rose, occasionally also by figures in relief and painted (as Xenophantos did in his aryballos with hunting Persians, meant for Eastern customers, in signing which he emphasizes his Athenian citizenship). The varying shades of the colour scale give one an inkling of the new problems of light, which were certainly struggling for expression not only in sculpture; in the drawing of the figures, rendered in strong relief strokes, nothing of this is observed. Thus the ‘Kerch’ masters ensure to their vases a finer general aspect than the Southern Italians, just as their commonest figures are distinguished from the Italian by a certain nobility; but they are far behind the huge advances of the great art, which now in its methods of expression attained the heights perhaps of Titian and Tintoretto, and have an arrieré effect, listless and

dull. Just as the new style could express itself better by the applied than by the reserved ornamentation, which in spite of new formations has a stiff and lifeless effect, so too the red-figured style, which as is proved by finds at Alexandria, continued to exist down into the early Hellenistic age, was no longer the congenial vehicle of the expression of its age; and it was only seldom that notable personalities attempted to practise it.

Rightly recognising that the days of the draughtsman and his decorative figure style were past and gone, the ceramic workshops of the late 4th century, and the Hellenistic, which appeared in several spots of the now decentralized Greek world, more and more gave up the red-figured technique. The great increase of the means of colouring, which is to be assumed for the late painting, the complete suppression of formal tendencies in favour of impressionism did not permit the silhouette style even a subsidiary place. The future belonged to free brush technique, that which painted in black, and that which had a black ground (pp. 110 and 157).

The figured world, the representations, no longer play any part; the Hellenistic painters prefer to put on their elegant, often playfully treated vases tendrils, festoons, hanging branches and fillets, wreathes and masks in loose arrangement. With these products of the mere craftsman, which are often of fascinating effect (cp. Fig. 160), but often in shape and decoration cause one to miss the delicate taste of earlier times, ends the history of Greek vase-painting; by pottery with relief ornament (already heralded by the completely black channelled vases of the 4th century and works like the aryballos of Xenophantos), which now gains ground more and more, painted pottery is completely driven off the field.

NOTE

Thanks are due to Messrs. F. Bruckmann, of Munich, for permission to reproduce several drawings from Furtwängler-Reichhold, Griechische Vasenmalerei.

INDEX OF ILLUSTRATIONS