vase-painting

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. The decoration of vases with pigments of any kind, especially the decoration of the pottery of the ancient Greeks, which, unless exceptionally, was executed in monochrome tints and outlines in unvitrfiable pigments. It is the most important of the minor arts of ancient Greece. From the variety and domesticity of the subjects treated, Greek vase-painting is of the greatest importance for the light shed by it upon every phase of ancient life; and from the art side it is equally valuable, not only from the fine decorative and creative quality which it frequently shows, but from the Information which it supplies regarding the great art of Greek painting, which has perished. The work bears something the relation to the great art that is borne by the comic and other illustrated prints to the painting of the present day. Historically, after the very ancient kindred styles of Asia Minor, the Ægean Islands, and the mainland of Greece (as at Mycenæ and Sparta), in which the rude ornament is geometric, or based on plants and animals, usually marine, with occasional admission of human figures, Greek vase-painting may be subdivided into four styles. The Dipylon or early Attic style, so called because the first examples recognized were found near the Dipylon gate in Athens. The ornament is largely geometric, with bands of slim and grotesque men and animals, the design becoming freer with the advance of time. The Corinthian style, in which the characteristic feature is the superposition of bands of animals and monsters, with rosettes and elaborate flowered and fringed borders, the whole following very closely the Assyrian and Phrygian embroideries, which were abundantly imported into Greece at this early time. (See cut under Corinthian.) The earliest distinctively Cypriote vases blend the characteristics of the Dipylon and Corinthian styles. The black-figured style, which, though archaic and often rude, has become thoroughly Hellenic. The ornament is in general black on a ground of the natural color of the pottery, which is most often dull red, sometimes yellow or gray. Some details of dress, etc., are put in purplish red; the flesh of female figures is commonly painted in white; occasionally bright red, dull green, and yellow are introduced. The red-figured or final Style, which Was developed early in the fifth century B. C, and continued until vasepainting was practically abandoned, about 200 b. c. It embraces the period of transition from the archaic, to which belong some of the first masters among vase-painters, and is by far the most important for study. In this style a tendency toward polychromy appears occasionally, but was not consistently worked out, except in the small but admirable class of Attic funeral lecythi. In some elaborate pieces of the fourth and third centuries, chiefly Attic, gilding is sparingly introduced. The style implies the presence of figures and of ornamental designs of every kind, very commonly in bands or zones running around the vase, in which the design appears in the natural red of the clay, details being indicated in simple black lines, and the ground being covered with solid glossy black. For examples of the red-figured decoration, see cuts under Greek and Poseidon.