Pottery of ancient Greece: Difference between revisions

Thanks to its hardy nature pottery bulks large in the archaeological record of ancient Greece, and because we have so much of it (some 100,000 vases are recorded in the Corpus vasorum antiquorum) it has exerted a disproportionately large influence on our understanding of that society. Little survives, for example, of ancient Greek painting except for what is found on the earthenware in everyday use, so we must trace the development of Greek art through its vestiges on a derivative art form. Nevertheless the shards of pots discarded or buried in the first millenium BC are still the best guide we have to the customary life and mind of the Greeks.

Development of Vase Painting

Protogeometric Style

Vases of protogeometrical period (c. 1050-900 BCE.) represent the return of craft production after the collapse of the Mycennean Palace culture and the ensuing Greek dark ages. Indeed, it is one of the few modes of artistic expression besides jewellery in this period since the sculpture, monumental architecture and mural painting of this era are unknown to us. Yet by 1050 BCE life in the Greek peninsula seems to have become sufficiently settled to allow a marked improvement in the production of earthenware. The style is confined to the rendering of circles, triangle, wavy lines and arcs, but placed with evident consideration and notable dexterity, probably aided by compass and multiple brush. The site of Lefkandi is our chief source of ceramics from this period where a cache of grave goods has been found giving evidence of a distinctive Euboian protogeometric. Attic production was the first to resume and influence the rest of Greece, especially Boiotia, Corinth, the Cyclades (in particular Naxos) and the Ionian colonies in the east Aegean.

The history of Ancient Greek pottery is divided stylistically into periods:

• the Protogeometric from about 1050 BC;
• the Geometric from about 900 BC;
• the Late Geometric or Archaic from about 750 BC;
• the Black Figure from the early 7th century BC;
• the Red Figure from about 530 BC;
• and the White Ground from the early 5th century BC.

The range of colours which could be used on pots was restricted by the technology of firing: black, white, red, and yellow were the most common. In the three earlier periods, the pots were left their natural light colour, and were decorated with slip that turned black in the kiln.

Red-figure kylix by Euerdiges (circa 500 BC) in the British Museum, London.

The fully mature black-figure technique, with added red and white details and incising for outlines and details, originated in Corinth during the early 7th century BC and was introduced into Attica about a generation later; it flourished until the end of the 6th century BC. The red-figure technique, invented in about 530 BC, reversed this tradition, with the pots being painted black and the figures painted in red. Red-figure vases slowly replaced the black-figure style. Sometimes larger vessels were engraved as well as painted.

During the Protogeometric and Geometric periods, Greek pottery was decorated with abstract designs. In later periods, as the aesthetic shifted and the technical proficiency of potters improved, decorations took the form of human figures, usually representing the gods or the heroes of Greek history and mythology. Battle and hunting scenes were also popular, since they allowed the depiction of the horse, which the Greeks held in high esteem. In later periods erotic themes, both heterosexual and male homosexual, became common.

Greek pottery is frequently signed, sometimes by the potter or the master of the pottery, but only occasionally by the painter. Hundreds of painters are, however, identifiable by their artistic personalities: where their signatures haven't survived they are named for their subject choices, as "the Achilles Painter", by the potter they worked for, such as the Late Archaic "Kleophrades Painter", or even by their modern locations, such as the Late Archaic "Berlin Painter". Corinth once made pottery decorated without any paint. Instead a watery clay mixture was used. When the pot was fired in a kiln, the areas painted with clay mixture turned black. Unpainted areas turned a light brown or reddish brown colour, depending on the type of clay.

For 200 years the Corinthians sold their pottery all over the Greek world, and Corinth became a wealthy and busy trading centre.

Manufacture

Material

Greece enjoys ample deposits of fine clay, in particular large quantities of good quality secondary clay. The clay around Athens is distinctive for its infusion with iron oxide (Fe₂O₃) which when fired gives a reddish-orange colour. This marks it out from the clays of other regions such as Corinth where the pottery has a lighter, creamy-white appearance. Indeed spectroscopy and other methods has revealed unexpected connections amongst vases distributed around the Mediterranean basin, as in the case of the hydriai from Hadra near Alexandria. Previously thought to be Egyptian in origin analysis of their chemical composition has shown them to have been imported from a workshop in Rhodes.

Primary clay was rarer and used sparingly mostly as an accessory colour in decoration, for example on white ground vases where it was applied in a thin uniform layer while the pot was on the wheel. All clay was purified through sedimentation in order to remove such impurities as quartz and limestone as would cause spalling or cracking during firing, and to increase the malleablity of the clay in the potter's hands.

Construction

Wheelmade pottery dates back to roughly 2500 BCE where before the coil method of building the walls of the pot was employed. Most Greek vases were wheelmade, though as with the Rhyton mould-made pieces (so-called "plastic" pieces) are also found and decorative elements either hand formed or by mould were added to thrown pots (the handles on a volute crater for instance). More complex pieces were made in parts then assembled when it was leather hard by means of joining with a slip, whereupon the potter returned to the wheel for the final shaping, or turning. It was then glazed and incised ready for the kiln.

Firing

The striking black metallic glaze (strictly speaking it is a gloss not a glaze) so characteristic of Greek pottery was a fine suspension of the same clay that was used for the rest of the vase with no added colouration, only levigated in alkaline water. The effect was achieved by of means changing the amount of oxygen present during firing. This was done in a single cycle, first the kiln was heated to 800° C when a vent is opened bringing oxygen into the firing chamber and turning pot and glaze a reddish-brown. Then as the temperature increased to 950° C the vent was closed and green wood introduced creating carbon monoxide which formed black ferrous oxide or magnetic oxide of iron with the ferric oxide in the clay. In the final reoxidizing phase the kiln was gradually cooled to 900° C and a little oxygen reintroduced causing the unglazed reserved clay to go back to orange-red, the glazed surface was sintered and could no longer be oxidized and remained black.

Inscriptions

Signature "Sophilos me egraphsen"

Inscriptions on Greek pottery are of two kinds; the incised (graffito) the earliest of which are contemporary with the beginnings of the Greek alphabet in the 8th century BCE, and the painted (dipinto), which only begin to appear a century later. Both forms are relatively common on painted vases until the Hellenistic period when the practice of inscribing pots seems to die out. They are by far most frequently found on Attic pottery where approximately one in ten (some 8,000 to 10,000) bears a legend.

A number of sub-classes of inscription can be distinguished. Potters and painters occasionally signed their works with epoiesen and egraphsen respectively. Trademarks are found from the start of the 6th century on Corinthian pieces; these may have belonged to an exporting merchant rather than the pottery workshop, though as with much of the rest of they study in this field this remains a matter of conjecture. Patron’s names are also sometimes recorded, as are the names of characters and objects depicted. At times we may find a snatch of dialogue to accompany a scene, as in Silenus declaring “the wine is sweet” . More puzzling, however, are the kalos and kalee inscriptions, which might have formed part of courtship ritual in Athenian high society, yet are found on a wide variety of vases not necessarily associated with a social setting. Finally there are abecedaria and nonsense inscriptions, though these are largely confined to black-figure pots.

Some of the leading vase painters of Athens, such as the Pioneer Group, seem to have revelled in adding text to their vases and it is a testament to their literacy and cultural daring that they did so. Undoubtedly it places them in a class apart from other ancient Greek artisans.

Rediscovery and Scholarship

Interest in Greek art lagged behind the revival of classical scholarship during the Renaissance and revived in the academic circle round Nicholas Poussin in Rome in the 1630s. Though modest collections of vases recovered from ancient tombs in Italy were made in the 15th and 16th centuries these were regarded as Etruscan. We know that Lorenzo de Medici bought several Attic vases directly from Greece; however the connection between them and the examples excavated in central Italy was not made until much later. Winckelmann's 'Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums of 1764 first refuted the Etruscan origin of what we now know to be Greek pottery, yet Sir William Hamilton's two collections, one lost at sea the other now in the British Museum, were still published as "Etruscan vases"; it would take until 1837 with Stackelberg's Gräber der Hellenen to conclusively end the controversy.

Much of the early study of Greek vases took the form of production of albums of the images they depict, however neither D'Hancarville's nor Tischbein's folios record the shapes or attempt to supply a date and are therefore unreliable as an archaeological record. Serious attempts at scholary study made steady progress over the 19th century starting with the founding of the Instituto di Corrispondenza in Rome in 1828 (later the German Archaeological Institute), followed by Eduard Gerhard's pioneering study Auserlesene Griechische Vasenbilder (1840 to 1858), the establishment of the journal Archaeologische Zeitung in 1843 and the Ecole d'Athens 1846. It was Gerhard who first outlined the chronology we now use, namely: Orientalizing (Geometric, Archaic), Black Figure, Red Figure, Polychromatic (Hellenistic). Finally it was Otto Jahn's 1854 catalogue Vasensammlung of the Pinakothek, Munich, that set the standard for the scientific description of Greek pottery, recording the shapes and inscriptions with a previously unseen fastidousness. Jahn's study was the standard textbook on the history and chronology of Greek pottery for many years, yet in common with Gerhard he dated the introduction of the red figure technique to a century later than was in fact the case. This error was corrected when the Aρχαιολογικη 'Εταιρεια undertook the excavation of the Acropolis in 1885 and discovered the so-called "Persian debris" of red figure pots destroyed by Persian invaders in 480 BC.

Where the 19th century was a period of discovery and the laying out of first principles the 20th century has been one of consolidation and intellectual industry. Efforts to record and publish the totality of public collections of vases began with the creation of the Corpus vasorum antiquorum under Edmond Pottier and the Beazley archive. It is to John Beazley's comprehensive studies Attic Red-Figure Vase Painters 1942 and Attic Black-Figure Vase Painters 1956 we owe the naming of dozens of previously forgotten artists by Morellian stylistic analysis. Similarly Arthur Dale Trendall and Darrell A. Amyx supplied the chronology to the otherwise neglected Apulian and Corinthian schools.

Uses and Types of Ancient Greek pottery

see article Typology of Greek Vase Shapes

Not all ancient Greek vases were purely utilitarian; large Geometric amphorae were used as grave markers, kraters in Apulia served as tomb offerings and Panathenaic Amphorae seem to have been looked on partly as objets d’art . Most other surviving pottery, however, had a practical purpose which determined its shape. The names we use for Greek vase shapes are often a matter of convention rather than historical fact, a few do illustrate their own use or are labeled with their original names, others are the result of early archaeologists attempt to reconcile the physical object with a known name from Greek literature – not always successfully. To understand the relationship between form and function Greek pottery may be divided in four broad categories: i) storage and transport vessels, ii) mixing vessels, iii) jugs and cups and iv) vases for oils, perfumes and cosmetics. Within each category the forms are roughly the same in scale and whether open or closed, where there is uncertainty we can make good proximate guesses of what use a piece would have served. Some have a purely ritual function, for example white ground lekythoi contained the oil used as funerary offerings and appear to make been made solely with that object in mind. Many example have a concealed second cup inside them to give the impression of being full of oil, as such they would have served no other useful gain.


There was an international market for Greek pottery since the 8th century BCE, which Athens and Corinth dominated down to the end of the 4th century. An idea of the extent of this trade can be gleaned from plotting the find maps of these vases outside of Greece, though this could not account for gifts or immigration. Only the existence of a second hand market could account for the number of panathenaics found in Etruscan tombs. South Italian wares came to dominate the export trade in the western Mediterranean as Athens declined in political importance during the Hellenistic period.

See also

• Black-figure pottery
• Red-figure pottery

Bibliography

• John Beazley, Attic Black-Figure Vase Painters, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1956.
• John Beazley, Attic Red-Figure Vase Painters, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1942.
• John Beazley, The Development of Attic Black-Figure, University of California, 1951.
• John Beazley, Paralipomena, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1971.
• John Boardman, Athenian Black figure Vases, London, 1974.
• John Boardman, Athenian Red Figure Vases, London, 1975.
• Martin Robinson, The Art of Vase-Painting in Classical Athens, Cambridge, 1992.
• Arthur Dale Trendall, Red figure Vases of South Italy and Sicily, London, 1989.

External links

• Beazley Achive of Greek pottery
• Ancient Greek Pottery Gallery
• S. Bleecker-Luce, A Brief History of the Study of Greek Vase Painting, American Philosophical Society 1918