1. Vases

There was a pretty legend in Greece that the first cup was molded upon Helen’s breast.⁵³ If so, the mold was lost in the Dorian invasion, for what pottery has come down to us from early Greece does not remind us of Helen. The invasion must have profoundly disturbed the arts, impoverishing craftsmen, scattering schools, and ending for a time the transmission of technology; for Greek vases after the invasion begin again with primitive simplicity and crudity, as if Crete had never lifted pottery into an art.

Probably the rough mood of the Dorian conquerors, using what survived of Minoan-Mycenaean techniques, produced that Geometric style which dominates the oldest Greek pottery after the Homeric age. Flowers, scenery, and plants, so luxuriant in Cretan ornament, were swept away, and the stern spirit that made the glory of the Doric temple contrived the passing ruin of Greek pottery. The gigantic jars that characterize this period made small pretense to beauty; they were designed to store wine or oil or grain rather than to interest a ceramic connoisseur. The decoration was almost all by repeated triangles, circles, chains, checkers, lozenges, swastikas, or simple parallel horizontal lines; even the human figures that intervened were geometrical—torsos were triangles, thighs and legs were cones. This lazy style of ornament spread through Greece, and determined the form of the Dipylon vases* at Athens; but on these enormous containers (usually made to receive the human dead) black silhouettes of mourners, chariots, and animals were drawn, however awkwardly, between the pattern’s lines. Towards the end of the eighth century more life entered into the painting of Greek pottery; two colors were used for the ground, curves replaced straight lines, palmettes and lotuses, prancing horses and hunted lions took form upon the clay, and the ornate Oriental succeeded the bare Geometric style.

An age of busy experimentation followed. Miletus flooded the market with its red vases, Samos with its alabasters, Lesbos with its black wares, Rhodes with its whites, Clazomenae with its grays, and Naucratis exported faience and translucent glass. Erythrae was famous for the thinness of its vases, Chalcis for brilliance of finish, Sicyon and Corinth for their delicate “Proto-Corinthian” scent bottles and elaborately painted jugs like the Chigi vase in Rome. A kind of ceramic war engaged the potters of the rival cities; one or another of them found purchasers in every port of the Mediterranean, and in the interior of Russia, Italy, and Gaul. In the seventh century Corinth seemed to be winning; its wares were in every land and hand, its potters had found new techniques of incision and coloring, and had shown a fresh inventiveness in forms. But about 550 the masters of the Ceramicus—the potters’ quarter on the outskirts of Athens—came to the front, threw off Oriental influence, and captured with their Black-Figure ware the markets of the Black Sea, Cyprus, Egypt, Etruria, and Spain. From that time onward the best ceramic craftsmen migrated to Athens or were born there; a great school and tradition formed as through many generations son succeeded father in the art; and the making of fine pottery became one of the great industries, finally one of the conceded monopolies, of Attica.

The vases themselves, now and then, bear pictures of the potter’s shop, the master working with his apprentices, or watchfully supervising the various processes: mixing the pigments and the clay, molding the form, painting the ground, engraving the picture, firing the cup, and feeling the happiness of those who see beauty taking form under their hands. More than a hundred of these Attic potters are known to us; but time has broken up their masterpieces, and they are only names. Here on a drinking cup are the proud words, Nikosthenes me poiesen—“Nicosthenes made me.”^53a A greater than he was Execias, whose majestic amphora is in the Vatican; he was one of many artists encouraged by patronage and peace under the Peisistratids. From the hands of Clitias and Ergotimus came, about 560, the famous François vase, found in Etruria by a Frenchman of that name, and now treasured in the Archeological Museum at Florence—a great mixing bowl covered with row upon row of figures and scenes from Greek mythology.⁵⁴These men were the outstanding masters of the Black-Figure style in sixth-century Attica. We need not exaggerate the excellence of their work; it cannot compare, either in conception or in execution, with the best work of the T’ang or Sung Chinese. But the Greek had a different aim from the Oriental: he sought not color but line, not ornament but form. The figures on the Greek vases are conventional, stylized, improbably magnificent in the shoulders and thin in the legs; and as this continued through the classic age, we must assume that the Greek potter never dreamed of realistic accuracy. He was writing poetry, not prose, speaking to the imagination rather than the eye. He limited himself in materials and pigments: he took the fine red clay of the Ceramicus, quieted its color with yellow, carefully engraved the figures, and filled out the silhouettes with brilliant black glaze. He transformed the earth into a profusion of vessels that wedded beauty and use: hydria, amphora, oenochoe, kylix, krater, lekythos—i.e., water jug, two-handled jar, wine bowl, drinking cup, mixing bowl, and unguent flask. He conceived the experiments, created the subjects, and developed the techniques that were taken up by bronzeworkers, sculptors, and painters; he made the first essays in foreshortening, perspective, chiaroscuro, and modeling;⁵⁵ he paved the way for statuary by molding terra-cotta figures in a thousand themes and forms. He freed his own art from Dorian geometry and Oriental excess, and made the human figure the source and center of its life.

Towards the last quarter of the sixth century the Athenian potter tired of black figures on a red ground, inverted the formula, and created that RedFigure style which ruled the markets of the Mediterranean for two hundred years. The figures were still stiff and angular, the body in profile with the eyes in full view; but even within these limits there was a new freedom, a wider scope, of conception and execution. He sketched the figures upon the clay with a light point, drew them in greater detail with a pen, filled in the background with black, and added minor touches with colored glaze. Here, too, some of the masters made lasting names. One amphora is signed, “Painted by Euthymides, son of Pollias, as never Euphronius”⁵⁶—which was to challenge Euphronius to equal it. Nevertheless this Euphronius is still rated as the greatest potter of his age; to him, some think, belongs the great krater on which Heracles wrestles with Antaeus. To his contemporary Sosias is attributed one of the most famous of Greek vases, whereon Achilles binds the wounded arm of Patroclus; every detail is lovingly carried out, and the silent pain of the young warrior has survived the centuries. To these men, and now nameless others, we owe such masterpieces as the cup in whose interior we see Dawn mourning over her dead son, and the hydria, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art at New York, that shows a Greek soldier, perhaps Achilles, plunging his lance into a fair and not breastless Amazon. It was before such a vase as one of these that John Keats stood enthralled one day, until its “wild ecstasy” and “mad pursuit” fired his brain with an ode greater than any Grecian urn.