Vase Painting

Paintings of the Classical period are known to have been copied in Italy and probably provided models for scenes depicted on the walls of houses at Pompeii (see p. 193). But there is no means of telling how faithful the copyists were or whether their work gives more than a very general impression of the original compositions. The only other visual evidence we have is that provided by the decorations on Greek pottery. These naturally differ from wall and panel paintings in several important respects, notably in scale. But they illustrate the development of those techniques of representation to which the literary sources refer.

Most Greek pottery painting is on useful wares (made for the toilet or for drinking parties, etc.), although some vases were intended for funerary or ceremonial purposes (e.g. for presentation at the Panathenaic games). They were, of course, less highly valued than metal vessels, few of which survive, for, unlike pottery, bronze and silver can be only too easily recycled. Yet great skill and artistry were lavished on them. Basic shapes both elegant and practical had been devised by the sixth century BC for the tall two-handled amphora with swelling body for wine, the three-handled hydria or water jug, the wide-mouthed krater, in which wine and water are mixed (as was customary), the small jug called an oinoche for pouring the mixture, and the wide, shallow cups, kylix and kantharos, from which it was drunk. The subject-matter of the figurative scenes depicted on them was usually mythological - very similar, in fact, to that of contemporary dramatic poetry and of such large-scale paintings as are recorded. A preference for stories about men and fabulous beasts rather than the immortals on Olympus is evident, although Dionysus, the god of wine, with his female followers the maenads attacked by lascivious satyrs, appears quite frequently. Also depicted are numerous scenes from daily life: artists and craftsmen at work, women engaged in household chores, athletes exercising in the gymnasium, drinking parties and theatrical performances. Love-making both heterosexual and homosexual is represented with extreme candour. Indeed, these vases reflect more clearly than any other surviving works of art the Greeks' preoccupation with their own world, the here and now.

In the sixth century BC figures were usually shown in black on a light orange-red ground. This so-called 'black-figure' process was a Greek invention which called for great technical skill. After a vessel had been formed (on a fast wheel by hand), allowed to dry and then burnished smooth, it was brushed over with a very thin coat of refined and diluted clay known as 'slip' (sometimes misleadingly called a glaze). When dry, it provided the ground on which decorations were painted, also in slip. The chemical properties of the clay used for the slip were such that when the pot was fired, and the heat of the kiln carefully controlled in three stages, the undercoat took on an orange-red color and the decorations a glossy black. Before the beginning of the fifth century BC the reversed 'red-figure' process was introduced as an alternative. The background of the composition was painted in with black slip, which was also used for adding details on the figures 'reserved' on the red undercoat. As the same type of local clay and the same method of firing were used in both processes, some potters 'showed off by painting one side of a vase in black-figure, the other in red-figure. Red-figure gradually replaced black-figure, which, from the early fifth century onwards, was used only for certain traditional types of vessel, notably those filled with oil and awarded to the winners in the Panathenaic games.

Black-figure was essentially an art of silhouette. The details that indicate the modelling of the body are picked out in red lines (or rather are incised through the black slip to the ground color) and make little visual effect. The red-figure process had to be used in order to transform these shadowy forms into light-illuminated figures and this led, in turn, to a departure from the purely conceptual image. On black-figure vases eyes, for instance, had to be shown frontally, even when the head was in profile, as it almost invariably was (the silhouette of a full face being insignificant). Foreshortening appears for the first time on red-figure vases.