Chapter 5

PLATE XXXIV.Fig. 67. CORINTHIAN PLATE.

PLATE XXXIV.

Fig. 67. CORINTHIAN PLATE.

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

PLATE XXXV.Fig. 69. CHALKIDIAN AMPHORA.

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.68and69) 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.70and71), 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 Chalkisitself, 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 copiesthe 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 animaldecoration 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

PLATE XXXVI.Fig. 70.HERAKLES AND GERYONEUS: FROM A CHALKIDIAN AMPHORA.

PLATE XXXVI.

Fig. 70.

HERAKLES AND GERYONEUS: FROM A CHALKIDIAN AMPHORA.

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 Herakleswith 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

PLATE XXXVII.Fig. 72. IONIC EYE KYLIX.

PLATE XXXVII.

Fig. 72. IONIC EYE KYLIX.

Fig. 73.HEAD OF ATHENA, BETWEEN THE EYES OF AN IONIC 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 infront 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

PLATE XXXVIII.Fig. 74.PHINEUS; DIONYSOS: FRIEZE ROUND THE INTERIOR OF AN IONIC EYE KYLIX.From Furtwängler-Reichhold, Griechische Vasenmalerei.

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 decorationof 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

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

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 placeson 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.76and78) 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

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

PLATE XL.

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

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

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 EastIonia. 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

PLATE XLII.Fig. 79. HERAKLES SLAYS BUSIRIS AND HIS FOLLOWERS: FROM A CÆRETAN HYDRIA.From Furtwängler-Reichhold, Griechische Vasenmalerei.

PLATE XLII.

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

From Furtwängler-Reichhold, Griechische Vasenmalerei.

Fig. 80. SPARTAN KYLIX.

PLATE XLIII.Fig. 81. HERAKLES BRINGS CERBERUS TO EURYSTHEUS: CÆRETAN HYDRIA.

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.82and83) 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, whichincludes 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;

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.

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

PLATE XLV.Fig. 84. RETURNING FROM BATTLE: FROM A SPARTAN KYLIX.

PLATE XLV.

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

PLATE XLVI.Fig. 85. ARKESILAS OF CYRENE WATCHING THE LADING OF SILPHION: FROM A SPARTAN KYLIX.

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 onewhich 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

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