CHAPTER II.THE GEOMETRIC STYLE

PLATE VII.Figs. 12 & 13. AMPHORÆ OF THE PALACE STYLE FROM KNOSSOS.

PLATE VII.

Figs. 12 & 13. AMPHORÆ OF THE PALACE STYLE FROM KNOSSOS.

are the oldest instance of this fact. The imported vases of the six graves are distributed over the whole of the first Late Minoan (early Mycenean) period, containing late specimens of Kamares style and early specimens of the Palace style: but the bulk of the ‘varnish’ vases found on the mainland belong to the succeeding period.

The second Late Minoan period of vase production in Crete, the so-called Palace style (Figs.12and13) is not so sharply divided from the first, as the latter is from the Kamares style. Both phases are connected by several transitional forms and run parallel for a time. An important difference is that the last traces of the Kamares technique (the imposition of white, red and orange on a black ground) disappear: there is simply painting in black on light clay (Mycenean technique). The decoration neglects the neck and foot of the vessel and emphasizes the shoulder, particularly with the characteristic half-branches. The animated reproductions of nature in the preceding style are treated in a fanciful way; they become fixed and are changed into ornaments and patterns for filling; the significant unity of the design is interrupted by foreign elements; the marine and plant ornamentation now never covers the whole vase but retires into a single band. In short, the naturalistic style gives place to a tectonic style, the representations are not the chief thing aimed at, which is the filling of the space. Beside the ornaments produced by the schematizing of living natural forms come new ones, which often look like a borrowing of architectural forms; moreover, the juxtaposition and combination of the ornaments show the same spirit, and also the emphasis now laid on the shape of the vase, in which the structure and the swinging contour reach their highest form of elegance, as can be seen most plainly in the amphorae.

This art had a wide influence outside Crete. To thebeginning of the period, the transition from the first to the second Late Minoan style, belong many mainland finds, especially from domed tombs, in Peloponnese (Vaphio, Argos, Mycenae, Old Pylos), in Attica (Athens, Thorikos, Spata), in Boeotia (Thebes, Orchomenos) and in Thessaly (Volo). The finds continue during the period of the developed Palace style. The majority of these ‘varnish’ vases seem not to have been imported from Crete but made by Cretan artizans in the country. The Mycenean local princes, who from their lofty citadels controlled the surrounding country, surrounded themselves more and more with the splendour of this southern civilization, ordered weapons, ornaments, precious vases from Crete, used them in life, gave them to the dead in graves; they also took into their service foreign artists, and gave employment to Cretan masons, painters and potters.

The islands too acquire Cretan vases: they were exported as far as Aegina, Melos, distant Cyprus, and the sixth city of Troy.

About the end of the second Late Minoan period the Cretan palaces of Phaistos, Knossos, and Hagia Triada are destroyed, and with the destruction of these and other sites the Palace style decays.

The pottery of the Late Mycenean (or third Late Minoan) period (Fig.14-17) is very inferior to that of the Palace style. The technique is at first neat but afterwards falls off: the smooth yellowish clay takes a green tinge, the brilliant glaze colour, often burnt red, becomes a lustreless black. The ornamentation consists of the last remains of the naturalistic decoration, now become quite lifeless and poor, with which are associated purely geometrical patterns of the simplest kind, wavy lines, spirals, concentric circles. Rectilinear patterns (groups of strokes, hatched triangles) become ever more prominent. The decoration is generally

PLATE VIII.Fig. 14. LATE MYCENEAN CUP FROM RHODES.

PLATE VIII.

Fig. 14. LATE MYCENEAN CUP FROM RHODES.

Fig. 15. LATE MYCENEAN STIRRUP-VASE FROM RHODES.

very loose, emphasizes the shoulder band, and usually puts on the lower half of the vase only a few stripes: vertical division of the field into ‘metopes’ is common.

But, on the other hand, figured representations are not unusual on late Mycenean vases. Two classes can be distinguished off-hand:—(a) animal representations, in traditional ornamental style and very ‘geometrical’ in treatment, particularly birds with cross-hatched bodies, certainly continuations of the old lustreless painting (cp. Fig.4with15); and (b) larger compositions taken over from wall-painting, often provided with ornaments to fill the field, like the chariot-race on the krater from Rhodes (Fig.17). The best-known example is the Warrior vase from Mycenae representing the departure for the battle-field.

Apart from these figured representations, one may say that Cretan vase-painting, after its brilliant achievements in the Kamares, shaft grave, and Palace styles, sinks down to that primitive level from which it started: it becomes once more a geometrical style.

The area over which we find this pottery is enormous, being practically the whole Mediterranean basin, Crete, Egypt, the Cyclades, the coast of Asia Minor (sixth city of Troy) and its adjacent islands (e.g.Rhodes), Cyprus (where the Mycenean supersedes an old and plentiful pottery akin to that of Troy), Phoenicia, Italy, Sicily, and especially all important sites of the Greek mainland. In many places, where the ‘varnish’ painting did not enter earlier, it now comes into contact with the old indigenous technique, with the monochrome, incised and lustreless vases: many backward settlements, like Olympia, seem to have had practically no acquaintance with the Mycenean style.

Here again the Egyptian finds give us a date: they last from about the end of the 15th down into the 12th century.But since it is not conceivable that we should date the Geometrical period, which followed the Mycenean, back into the second millennium, the late Mycenean style must have lasted at least four centuries; the rate of development, which in the time of great achievements had been very rapid, must have become considerably slower.

To arrange the huge mass of late Mycenean vases in this long development is impossible, until the material has been sifted and worked through. But one thing already can be said with certainty, that it was not merely exported from Crete; indeed it is more than questionable, whether Crete played the leading part. In this period the native seat of the brilliant Minoan civilization is no longer in the foreground; the centre of gravity has shifted to the mainland, in particular the Argolid. Even in the period of the shaft graves we see the Peloponnesians eagerly adopting Cretan civilization; in the following period the mainland vies with Crete in the production of Mycenean vases, and finally must have wrested the lead from the southern outpost. This applies not merely to civilization but to political conditions. A hypothesis, in favour of which there is much to be said, connects the destruction of the Cretan palaces with the invasion of conquering ‘Achaeans,’ the name Homer applies to the lords of the mainland. Just as the wall-painting originally borrowed from Crete was still flourishing on the mainland, when it had died out at home, so the late Mycenean pottery must have been produced mainly in continental Greece, and the new style must have been formed by the Peloponnesians. Thus we can explain the non-Minoan elements, the strong geometrical influence on the decoration, and the taking over of figured scenes from wall-painting, which was rejected by the old Cretans.

So it was probably the ‘Achaeans’ who spread the late Mycenean pottery all over the Mediterranean.

PLATE IX.Figs. 16 & 17. LATE MYCENEAN VASES FROM RHODES.

PLATE IX.

Figs. 16 & 17. LATE MYCENEAN VASES FROM RHODES.

They had become a seafaring nation on a great scale. Of their entry into Crete we have just spoken, of their united campaigns of conquest in Asia Minor, in which the Cretan king has the Argive Agamemnon as his overlord, the Homeric poems tell us, and of their colonizing expansion in the Mediterranean the vase finds among other things give evidence, as they justify conclusions about new localities of manufacture (Troy, Rhodes, Cyprus, etc.).

In the beginning of the first millennium the scene is totally altered. On the coast of Asia Minor and the islands are settled Hellenic races, among which the Aeolians and Ionians are probably descendants of the emigrated Achaeans, while the Dorians represent a new tribe come in from the north, which subdued the Peloponnese and Crete and extended to the south of the Aegean Sea.

These shiftings of population, the so-called Dorian invasion, with which Greek historians begin the history of their country, mark the end of the Bronze Age and of the Mycenean civilization. Iron weapons, only sporadically to be found in the late Mycenean age, take the place of bronze; the Mycenean vase style vanishes all along the line, and gives way to a new style, the Geometric.

NOW for the first time the history of Greek vases proper begins. In the pottery of the geometric style are latent the forces, which we see afterwards expanding in contact with the East, as well as the oldest beginnings that we can trace of that brilliant continuous development, which led to the proud heights of Klitias, Euphronios, Meidias. Its producers may be unreservedly described as Greeks: Hellas has come into being. However primitive the civilization of this early Greece may have been, however patriarchal is the picture which Homer, the great genius of this period, gives us of this world, however much the works of art described by him point to Mycenean reminiscences and Phoenician importation, yet in the department of ceramics the art of this time was thoroughly original and highly developed, and it is from the vases that this early phase gets its name.

We should like to have a glimpse of the origin of the Geometric style, but its beginnings are shrouded in darkness. It cannot be regarded as simply a descendant of the pre-Mycenean Geometric pottery, which in outlying parts continued throughout the Bronze Age; for in its ‘varnish’ technique, its forms and decoration, it is totally different from those primitive vessels. As little is it a direct continuation of the Mycenean style, from which it took over the technique of painting. However much towards the end of its development the latter inclined to decoration inbands and the geometrizing of ornament, it was an outworn poor style that arose out of schematizing of living forms, in complete contrast with the clear concise Geometric style, which consistently unfolds and exhausts its individuality.

Naturally the Mycenean style did not disappear abruptly from the face of the earth, and there are transitional forms, which cannot be nicely divided. They must not be too highly estimated; they are, it is true, at the beginning of the new development, but do not influence it. Thus the ‘Salamis’ vases, and their parallels from Athens, Nauplia, and Assarlik in Southern Asia Minor, show this transition, retaining in part Mycenean forms like the stirrup vase, and Mycenean ornaments like the spiral, but being in fact an insignificant ware, of bad workmanship and meagre decoration. More interesting is the survival of Mycenean traditions in Crete, the home of the Minoan style, and in the Argolid, the chief seat of late Mycenean civilization: certain vase-shapes, hatched triangles, concentric circles and semi-circles on the shoulder are retained from the old style.

From these and other Mycenean reminiscences the unfolding of the new style cannot be explained any more than by a revival of pre-Mycenean Geometric styles. We must rather bring in, to explain the phenomenon, those movements of peoples, the driving out of southern Mycenean civilization by races advancing from the North, and the new mixture of blood, which strengthened and made dominant the northern European element. Though the Dorians did not develop the style as conspicuously as other tribes, there arose out of the ferment caused by their appearance on the scene the new creative vigour, the Greek element proper, which, out of the frozen traditions of the mainland and the lifeless relics of Mycenean art created a new style and a firm basis for a fine development.

The Geometric style makes a virtue of the necessities of rude beginnings; out of the simple decorative material at its disposal, it creates a rich system. Angular patterns, rows of dots, strokes, ‘fish-bones,’ zig-zags, crosses, stars, hooked crosses, triangles, rhombi, hook maeanders, maeanders broken up in different ways, maeander systems, chequers, net patterns are most common; alongside of them are circles and rosettes neatly made with the compass. The wavy line, which like the snake edged with dots perhaps comes from Mycenean polyps, takes a second place; all other free ornamentation is eschewed; the place of continuous spirals is taken by circles connected by tangents. Thus the ornamentation appears to be steeped in mathematics, and the same is the case with the representation of living beings. Man and animal alike appear in stylized silhouettes, which bring the various parts of the body into the simplest possible scheme, and set them off sharply against one another. Thus the human breast appears as an inverted triangle and is shown frontally, but the legs and head are in profile. The head, which is only emancipated from the silhouette style in the succeeding period, already often has a space reserved in it to indicate the eye. As a rule the human body is represented naked, while towards the end of the period, the instances of clothing, especially of women, become more numerous. There has been division of opinion as to whether this nudity reproduces actual life. That is certainly not the case. “This is the nudity of the primitive artist, of the abstract linear style. It is not man as he actually is, but the concept ‘man’ which is to be rendered, and clothes are no part of this concept.” (Furtwängler). These oldest Greek representations of man are not, properly speaking, reproductions of nature, but a kind of mathematical formulæ;, which gradually in the course of centuries of fresh observation of

PLATE X.Fig. 18. ATTIC GEOMETRIC AMPHORA (DIPYLON CLASS).

PLATE X.

Fig. 18. ATTIC GEOMETRIC AMPHORA (DIPYLON CLASS).

Fig. 19.GEOMETRIC AMPHORA, PROBABLY ATTIC (BLACK DIPYLON CLASS).

Fig. 19.

GEOMETRIC AMPHORA, PROBABLY ATTIC (BLACK DIPYLON CLASS).

nature become richer, corporeal, living, spiritual. Animal representation begins also in the same formulistic manner. The choice is in contrast with the Minoan animal world: there is complete absence of the Oriental animal world of fancy; we only see the Northern fauna; horses, roes, goats, storks, geese. The animals stand upright, graze, or rest with neck turned round. The technique is always that of the pure silhouette; only the birds often, as in the pre-Mycenean and late Mycenean styles (Figs.4and15), show hatched or cross-hatched inner drawing of the body.

These geometric ornaments and abstract silhouettes of men and animals form the complete stock out of which the artist of the period provides for the decoration of his vases. With them he fills the bands into which he loves to divide the vase (Fig.18); or at all events the shoulder or handle band, constructively the most important, in which case he covers the lower part of the vase with black (Fig.19) or with parallel rings (Fig.23). The bands, the breadth of which is varied, are filled in two ways. Either we have continuous ornaments, and processions of animals, chorus dancers, warriors, chariots and horses, which in this style are essentially nothing but ornament; or he divides the bands, and particularly the handle bands (Fig.19) vertically into rectangular fields, metopes as they are called. The metope naturally takes a different scheme of filling the space from the band; if the latter prefers a continuous series, the former requires ornaments complete in themselves, like circles and rosettes, or in the case of figures, the antithetical group, the heraldic opposition of two different fields of figures, or of two figures in the same field. The figures connected by compulsion of space are then more closely united by a central motive, and there arise ornamental compositions not at all drawn from actual life,e.g.two birds both holding in their beaks a fish or a snake, twohorses with crossed fore-legs, rearing towards each other, tied to a tripod, or held by a man with a bridle, two roes with raised fore-legs leaning against a tree. Band and metope with their compulsory schematism no longer suffice for the growing need of representation: in the large vases the chief band is often made very high, or in the upper part of the vase a rectangle adorned with ornament or figures is left out from the surrounding black: thus arises the vase with special field for subjects.

Legend, which in this period found its brilliant expression in the Epics of Homer and Hesiod, is still very much in the background in these vase-paintings. Centaurs only begin to be represented on late Geometric vases. Scenes such as the embarkation on the bowl from Thebes (Fig.21) cannot be interpreted otherwise than mythically, as the rape of Helen by Paris or of Ariadne by Theseus, since on Geometric bronze fibulæ from Boeotia it is certain that legendary scenes are intended. The battle scenes too, with their duellists surrounded by spectators and their fights on a large scale by land and sea, must be inspired by the Heroic Saga. But far more numerous are the scenes of daily life, which are connected with the sepulchral purpose of the vases. We see the dead man lying on the bed of state, covered with a big cloth; men, women, and children, with arms raised to their heads in token of grief, are standing, sitting and kneeling around him; we see the bier placed on the hearse, and amid loud lamentation of the populace driven to the cemetery, while, in honour of the deceased, chariot-races and mimic battles are represented and dances are performed to the sound of flutes and lyres.

As the human form is rendered without any feeling for bodily shape, so all the representations are without any spatial sense. Chariot floors and table surfaces are not fore-shortened, the breast of the dead man lying on the bier

PLATE XI.Fig. 20. UPPER HALF OF A DIPYLON GRAVE-VASE.

PLATE XI.

Fig. 20. UPPER HALF OF A DIPYLON GRAVE-VASE.

Fig. 21. ‘THE RAPE OF HELEN,’ ON A BOWL FROM THEBES.

is represented in front view, the covering of the corpse is visible in its complete extent, as if it hung down upon it; in the case of pairs of horses the off horse is simply moved forward and represented smaller; masses of men are rendered by files of similar figures; figures to be thought of as in the background,e.g.the hinder rows in the Helen bowl (Fig.21) are placed high up. The space, which contains the figures, is an ideal tectonic space, the surface of the vase to be adorned. Where the figures do not suffice to fill this space, the Geometric artist regards it as a gap in the decoration of the vase and fills the void with dots, rows of zig-zags, hooked crosses, rosettes with a central point, and actually paints birds or fishes between the legs of horses or between the chariot and the bier which rests upon it (Fig.20).

This even covering of the surface gives the vases of this period a carpet-like appearance, and this textile impression is strengthened by the geometry of the ornamentation, by the angular stylization of the living beings, by the decorative schemes and the division into bands. But on this account to derive the whole style from the imitation of works of the loom would be a mistake; the stylistic limitations of the style cannot be identified straight off with the technical limitation of weaving. As in all primitive civilizations so in the formation of the Geometric vase style, simple linear patterns may have been taken over from weaving and plaiting: but this is not the case with circles and rosettes, and anyhow such a consistent and systematic perfection as that of the Geometric vase style is inconceivable as an imitation of a foreign technique.

Greek ceramic art never completely lost this ‘textile’ character, and never quite renounced the Geometric school through which it passed, though by centuries of labour it freed itself from the defects and crudities of thatschool. Vase-figures long exhibit their origin out of the ornamental silhouette; the decorative schemes of arrangement in rows and of antithetic groups are always breaking out afresh; the principle of using up the space is applied superficially for some time and only gradually refined; the decoration in bands subsists for a long time beside the vases with a pictorial field, and remains of it exist till late; the disinclination for deepening the field, based on a correct structural feeling, goes through the whole history of Greek vases and keeps the ornamental figure world of the vases always at a distance from the much less constrained world of free painting.

The Geometric vases have not merely a historical meaning, but a value of their own. They are not a preliminary stage, but something complete. In them Greek art in true Greek fashion worked out a thought; expressed itself for the first time in a classical way, if the phrase may be used; out of a clumsy rustic style with poor ornamentation developed vases of technical perfection, compact and clear in form, consistently thought out in the decoration now lavishly, now sparingly spread over them, in their austere beauty true children of the Greek genius.

But this style did not put out everywhere equally fine flowers. It was not, like the late Mycenean, an ‘imperial’ style, but, from the first—and this is significant for Greek art—differentiated and conditioned by locality; each region had its own manufacture of vases, and its own Geometric style. Already the lead is taken by that place, which later was to drive out of the field all competitors, viz., Athens. The Dipylon vases—the name usually given to Attic Geometric vases from the fact that most of them were found in the cemetery before the Dipylon Gate,—rise in form, technique and decoration to the greatest perfection and highest richness. In the magnificent amphoræ, asmuch as two metres in height, which are worthy of their monumental use as tomb decoration, the Geometric style perhaps reaches its culmination; in the so-called black Dipylon vases, often only sparingly decorated on the shoulder or neck and otherwise covered black, we get already an effect of colour which became popular much later; the stock of forms is ampler, the maeander more developed, the delight in telling a story and in representing a scene greater than in other Geometric styles. Beside the Dipylon there is a second site in Attica, Eleusis, though not so important; Boeotia too must be mentioned, the pottery of which makes a provincial impression, and is dependent in forms, patterns and subjects on Attica and the Aegean islands, as also that of the neighbouring Eretria in Euboea.

The prototypes of the big Boeotian and Eretrian amphoræ with high stem and broad neck have been found particularly in Delos and Rheneia, richly ornamented vases ‘de luxe,’ in which the painting is laid on a white slip. In the same place, where the cult of Apollo had a great attraction, several other Geometric classes were also found, among them the precursors of the art which flourished in the 7th century and which is usually ascribed to the island of Melos. On the Delian vases horses and human representations occur, but generally in this class there is a disinclination to represent figures. The same disinclination and the frequent use of a light slip characterize the pottery of the Dorian island of Thera, which developed a very definite though sober and monotonous Geometric style that seems to have obstinately persisted till well into the 7th century. The rich finds of other classes bear witness to an active trade with the mainland, other Cyclades, and the Ionic East, the pottery of which has many points of contact with the Cycladic. We know it from Miletus and other places on the Asiatic coast, but above all from the island ofRhodes. The Rhodian Geometric vases are distinguished from the Cycladic by the absence of the light slip, and seem in spite of many points of contact never to have reached the same level. An isolated vegetable ornament, the so-called palm-tree, points to relations with Cyprus. Cross-hatched rhombi and birds are very much in vogue; they appear also in loose arrangement on the ‘Bird kylikes,’ which in post-Geometric times extended from Rhodes over the Ionian region and so made their way to the Greek mainland, Italy and Sicily.

The most important Peloponnesian manufactures are: (1) that of Sparta, which now to some extent adopts the white slip later predominant; (2) that of Argos, which soon discards its Mycenean reminiscences and develops on parallel lines with the Attic ware without attaining to the heights and richness of the Dipylon vases; (3) above all, the so-called Protocorinthian.

This Geometric style, which next to the Attic had the greatest future before it, seems to be at home in the Northern Argolid (p. 34). Its early Geometric beginnings we do not know. It is akin to its Argive neighbour in many points, in the scantiness of its stock of forms, in shapes like the metallic krater with a stirrup-handle. Unfortunately little has been left to us of the large-sized vases, kraters, cauldrons, amphoræ and jugs. The two-handled cup (Fig.23), the round box, the globular oil-flask, the deep drinking-cup, the jug with flat bottom (Fig.33) are the favourite smaller shapes. The limitation of the decoration to the upper margin, and the decoration of the rest with parallel stripes is characteristic. This ware was more exported than any other Geometric class; it entered the southern Argolid, went by way of Corinth and Eleusis to Boeotia and Delphi, and was exported to Aegina and Thera, Italy and Sicily. On Italian soil, in the Euboean

PLATE XII.Fig. 22. RHODIAN GEOMETRIC JUG.

PLATE XII.

Fig. 22. RHODIAN GEOMETRIC JUG.

Fig. 23. PROTOCORINTHIAN GEOMETRIC SKYPHOS.

colony of Kyme, it certainly founded a branch factory, which quickly took on a local character and exported in its turn; but in various other places also the style evoked local imitations.

The Protocorinthian style owed its brilliant future both to the Geometric foundation, and, as will appear, to the strong influence of Cretan Art. In Crete, after the settlement of the Dorians in the island, no definite Geometric style was formed: the Mycenean traditions were too strong and the relations with the East too close. After the purely Geometric vases, among which wide-bellied amphoræ without a neck are common, there soon appear vases showing Cyprian influence, particularly small jugs with concentric circles on the body (precursors ofFig. 27); thus a pitcher from Kavusi, which by an exception has figures on it (a charioteer and mourning women in a metope-like arrangement) is apparently, in shape as well as in the ornament which consists of a row of ‘S’s’ on their backs and the un-Geometric drawing of its silhouettes, dependent on similar Cyprian models.

Crete with its loosely-rooted Geometric style took up the new elements more freely than other localities, where at first they are placed side by side with the native ones, like the palm-tree on Rhodian vases, the Cyprian circles on Attic and Protocorinthian jugs, the precursors of the tongue pattern on Attic and Theran vases, the unsystematic rays on Attic and Protocorinthian ware, the running spiral probably borrowed from metal work on Protocorinthian and Theran vases. Moreover, figured representations from an alien world of ideas creep into the fixed Geometric systems, as for instance the two lions devouring a man on a Dipylon vase, the goddess flanked by two animals on a Boeotian amphora, the fabulous creatures on Rhodian vases.

These foreign elements, which have their root inOriental art, are the harbingers of a complete revolution, and in them is heralded the end of the Geometric style. It is obvious that a decorative style like the Geometric could have no future: its possibilities were quickly exhausted, even where the style was most richly developed. Its dissolution would have come, even if superior civilization with richer methods of decoration had not been in close contact of trade and intercourse with this early Greek world, and exercised on it a persistent influence. The Cretans and Eastern Greeks lived in the immediate neighbourhood of Egypt and Asia, the islands and the mainland were united to the East by active trade relations. In particular Phoenician merchants, while the Geometric style was flourishing, handed on to the Greeks the products of Oriental art, as both the Epic and the finds testify. Nor did the Greeks remain at home either, but had long become a seafaring people; Attic, Boeotian and Protocorinthian painters proudly place representations of ships on Geometric vases; the statistics of the finds of the various Geometric wares show a constantly growing trade intercourse. Colonisation too has already begun, and is ever expanding; according to the earliest vase finds Syracuse, Kyme, and perhaps also Massilia and the Black Sea coast received settlers, while their mother-cities still had Geometric pottery. Since Syracuse was founded in the second half of the 8th century and its oldest graves contain late Geometric vases, we obtain an approximate date for the end of the Geometric style.

The objects of Oriental Art, which were brought before the eyes of the Greeks by this active intercourse, powerfully stimulated their fancy. The crowd of decorative motives from vegetation, the world of fantastic animals, and the superiority of Oriental Art in the rendering of life, drew Greek vase-painting out of Geometric uniformity and pointed it to new paths.

PLATE XIII.Fig. 24. ATTIC GEOMETRIC KYLIX.

PLATE XIII.

Fig. 24. ATTIC GEOMETRIC KYLIX.

Figs. 25 & 26. CRETAN JUGS IN THE FIRST ORIENTALISED STYLE.

AS the Oriental motives pour into the Greek world, a new development begins, which in the details of its course is still hard to grasp, the collision of the native Geometric style with Oriental influence, the fusion of both elements into a new unity, and the growth of the archaic style. In contrast with the quiet and consistent unfolding of Geometric style, the process to anyone who goes deep into its details takes on the character of a restless fermentation, and an almost dramatic tension. It occupies, roughly speaking, the 7th century. Without forgetting how arbitrary divisions in the history of Art must always be, let us here treat as one the period from the end of the Geometric style to the abandonment of filling ornament, the change in technique of clay and colouring, and the formation of the established body of black-figured types.

The smelting process took on a different character in the different regions, according to the tenacity with which the old style was retained, and the intensity of the contact with the East. In most places there follows first a period of hesitation and experimentalism, out of which finally the new style is formed. Nowhere does the Oriental element simply take the place of the Greek Geometric; the acquisitions of the old style, the fixed vase shapes, the principles of decoration, and the technique, remain and are further developed. Greek pottery was much too highly and richly developed, too firmly rooted, to find it necessary toimitate Oriental clay vases. The stimuli were of much more general nature; they are chiefly visible in the ornamentation and pictorial types, they are taken from metal vases and richly embroidered materials, from costly carpets, articles of jewellery, engraved gems, and other fine things, which the foreign trader or the seafaring Greek brought from the Near or Far East or saw with his own eyes abroad. It became apparent to him, that the Geometric style was really poverty-stricken and mathematical. The feeling for finely-drawn line and vivid reproduction of life awoke in view of the freer Art of the East; the Greek made the Oriental models his own and created out of them and the mathematical element a new Art. Not all stimuli come direct from the East; perhaps only comparatively few, which were then passed on, were constantly altered and took on varied local colour. It looks as if the stream of Oriental influence took two different routes, one by way of the Greek East (Rhodes, Samos, Miletus) and another by way of Crete, which evidently had a strong influence on the Cyclades and Peloponnesus.

In Crete Phoenician metal objects have been found, which were imported during the Geometric period, and the Cretan Geometric pottery soon takes up motives of decoration borrowed from the Oriental or Orientalizing metal industry. The row of ‘S’s,’ which plays a part in Geometric bronzes, appears as we have seen on the Kavusi jug (p. 27). Its climax is the cable pattern (guilloche), which is obviously borrowed from Phoenician metal vessels (Fig.26). The tongue pattern (Fig.25-27) which surrounds the lower part and the shoulder of the vases, like the rays similarly used (Fig.31-35), goes back ultimately to Egyptian plant calyces. The connection with bronze patterns is fully proved by the dots often placed on the ornaments, by the technique of adding white on black painted vases (Fig.29)

PLATE XIV.Fig. 27. CRETAN MINIATURE JUG.

PLATE XIV.

Fig. 27. CRETAN MINIATURE JUG.

Fig. 28. THE FLIGHT FROM THE CAVE OF POLYPHEMUS, FROM A JUG FROM ÆGINA.

which aims at a metallic effect, and by the change of the vase shapes. These often get a quite non-ceramic appearance (Fig.25), and in their rounding and contouring, especially by the emphasis on the foot (Figs.25and27), they are in contrast with the Geometric forms. The Praisos jug (Fig.26) is obviously under Cypriot influence, as is the delicate Berlin jug (Fig.27), in which a previously described class (p. 27) reaches its high water mark. The Praisos pitcher (Fig.25) to the Orientalizing patterns enumerated already adds the hook spirals, which are characteristic of the 7th century, and the Berlin jug adds also the volute and the palmette. The plastic head which crowns this little bottle, and is entirely inspired by the Egypto-Phoenician ideas of form, inaugurates a new era in the representation of man. We are now in the time when Greek sculpture was born, in that notable period when Greek art under the influence of Oriental art took to the chisel, to enter on a century of development which ended in giving shape to the loftiest and most delicate creations that can move the spirit of man. It is noteworthy that Greek tradition embodied the beginnings of this development in a Cretan, Daedalus, and to a kinsman of this ancestor of all Greek sculptors it traced back the invention of the great art of painting, without the influence of which we cannot conceive of vase-paintings henceforward.

The first period of the transitional style betrays little of this influence. The reproduction of living beings is dominated by the decorative figures of the East, especially monsters and fabulous beings, which now make their entry into Greek art, and exercise a powerful attraction not only on plastic art, but on poetic and mythopœic fancy. Thus the Geometric silhouette is superseded. If even the preceding age had felt the need of leaving void a hole to indicate the eye, now the head is completely rendered byan outline and made lifelike by interior drawing (Fig.30). The next stage is that the whole body also is rendered in contour. To make the transition plain, we show here a vase-fragment, the Cretan origin of which is not established, but which must be in close connection with Cretan art, the Ram jug from Aegina (Fig.28). The animal frieze, with its hook spirals, dot rosettes, rhombi and triangles to fill the space, is characteristic of older Oriental art; the drawing of the rams is far beyond Geometric technique; in the body too the silhouette is given up, and indication of the hide is attempted. This animal frieze is no longer an end in itself: by the men clinging to them the ornamental rams become mythical rams, the rams of the Odyssey. The fugitives are not very closely connected with their saviours, and the giant must have been more than blind not to notice them. But on the other hand the artist has drawn them very clearly, has put both arms and both legs in view of the spectator, and even, where a small detail would not otherwise have shown well, made a small nick in the belly of the ram. This shows how the artist of the period could with difficulty do without a clear outline.

These attempts are perfected in the outlined figure of a plate from Praisos, which is certainly Cretan (Fig.29). The childishly disproportioned structure has now become a clear organism of genuine Greek stamp, full of excellent observation of nature; the ornamentally constrained picture becomes now a free version of a legend, which however cannot be interpreted with certainty, till the white object under the sea-monster has been explained. It is most likely that we may see in it the foot of a female figure filling the left half of the plate, perhaps Thetis, who escapes from the attacks of Peleus by changing into a fish. The interior incised lines in the body of the sea-monster are a novelty, which the ceramic art has developed

PLATE XV.Fig. 29. HERAKLES AND SEA-MONSTER (?) FROM A CRETAN PLATE.

PLATE XV.

Fig. 29. HERAKLES AND SEA-MONSTER (?) FROM A CRETAN PLATE.

Fig. 30. ARGIVE KRATER WITH THE SIGNATURE OF ARISTONOTHOS: SEVENTH CENTURY.

independently (p. 37). But on the other hand the advance in drawing and the technical rendering of form, the outline of Peleus, the light colour of the woman, the reddish brown tint of the rider on the reverse, cannot be explained apart from the influence of free painting, whose oldest stages are stated to have been outlining with progressive drawing of interior details, monochromy (i.e.outline drawing with a filling of colour) and distinction of sex by colour. After an interval of several centuries wall-painting must have sprung up again and flourished in Crete, different to be sure in essentials from the Minoan, rather influenced by the East like the decorative art of the time. In spite of the tendency to represent painting as ‘invented’ in Greece, Greek tradition reluctantly admits that this art was indigenous and highly developed in Egypt long before.

The bloom of Cretan art seems not to have outlasted the 7th century. Finds give out, and tradition expressly testifies to the migration of Cretan sculptors to the Argolid, a district which also took over the inheritance of Cretan vase painting.

Of the two chief centres of Argive Geometric vase fabrication, one which is to be sought in the region of Argos and Tiryns cannot be followed out very clearly. The oldest Greek vase signed by an artist, the krater of the potter Aristonothos with the blinding of Polyphemus (Fig.30), seems from the shape of the vase to belong to this class. The complicated shape of the circle of rays, the breaking up of the head silhouette, the juxtaposition of the traditional sea-fight with the legendary scene, are typical of the early Orientalizing period; certain parallels with the late Mycenean Warrior vase (p. 15) perhaps justify the conclusion, that remains of the old wall-painting had an influence on the style. Like the Aristonothos vase, some stirrup-handled kraters with metope decorations continue ArgiveGeometric traditions. These vases, however, are exclusively found in the West (Syracuse) and were probably made there; they do not give faithful reflection of their Argive prototypes. A krater with tall foot and ornamentation in bands, found at the Argive Heraion, representing the rescue of Deianeira, with plentiful use of ‘monochromy,’ is too isolated to make a picture of this Orientalizing pottery possible.

It cannot have played a leading part, but must soon have been put in the shade by its near neighbour and rival. For that the so-called Protocorinthian fabrication is also at home in the Argolid is proved by the fact that the chief places, where the ware is found, are Argos and Aegina, and that quantities of small and hardly exportable ware are found at various places in the district. The alphabet of the inscriptions agrees with this locality, and so does the style, which leads up to the Corinthian, whence the name has been given, as well as the fact that the great trading-centre of Corinth looked after the sale of the wares; for the area in which they were sold is identical with that of the Corinthian vases. On account of these close relations with Corinth, the home of the Protocorinthian vases has been sought with great probability in the neighbouring town of Sicyon, of which we are told that it was the place to which Cretan artists migrated, that it was the birthplace of Greek painting and seat of a flourishing metal industry, so that we are able to account for three ingredients of the new style. For the Protocorinthian style of the 7th century gave the most delicate development of Cretan ‘Daedalic’ types, particularly near its end; fixed a clear style of figure representation and an ample store of types, and developed its vase-shapes, system of decoration and technique, under the influence of metal patterns, more severely, precisely and richly than any

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