motives suitable to the occasion and scattered birds, serpents, lizards (Figs. [34] and [66]), and in the triumph of figure-subjects over friezes of ornament or animals, which can best be followed in the kraters (Fig. [ 65]). With this step, which is completed in the beginning of the 6th century, we are brought close to the black-figured style proper, which is differentiated by some technical innovations.
But before we pass to that, we have still to follow the transition here described through the other fabrics of the 7th century. We can rapidly pass over Sparta, which as yet produces no ware fit for exportation. The course here is similar to what went on in the Argolid. Beside many specialities one seems to notice kinship with Ionian pottery in the small bands of squares accompanied by dots and the branches on the edge of the kylix, in the placing of similar animals in rows. In what close relation earlier Spartan civilization stood to Ionia, we learn from the history of lyric poetry.
To the three stages, earlier Protocorinthian, later Protocorinthian, older Corinthian, answer the three groups in Attica named respectively after Phaleron, the Nessos vase and Vurvá. The break-up of the most definite of all Geometric styles seems to have taken place in spite of vehement opposition. Details of the Oriental flora and fauna are first assimilated to the old style, and taken unobtrusively into the Geometric system of decoration. In the group named after the finds at Phaleron the new style with marked Phoenician imitations gets the upper hand. To the unsystematic reproduction and application of the new ornaments, now arbitrarily scattered, now ranged in special rows, and so added to the others, succeeds a severer choice, stylization and arrangement; the luxuriant vegetable character of the decoration (Fig. [46]), with which birds and insects are often combined, only lasts for a time. The same experimental hesitation prevails in the figure drawing, which does not go straight from the Geometric silhouette to contour drawing and monochromy, but very soon experiments from time to time in the incised line and added white paint, and in the later Phaleron stage is not sparing of details in red, e.g., for the hair and dress. The progress in the rendering of nature happily can still be followed to some extent in big vases. It leads to a fixed type with a loose outline with ankles, knee-pan, and elbow rendered like ornaments: in the head the big eye in front view dominates at the expense of the forehead, the skull is flat, the aquiline nose is very prominent, the ear is like a volute. Similarly in early Greek sculpture an ornamental conception of the outline and the details of the body is expressed, and casts a light on the conception of ornament as something living and not yet felt to be an abstraction from reality.
The big Phaleron vases also give evidence as to the grouping of the figures, which we have not been able to get from the Protocorinthian vases that have been preserved. Older specimens like the Berlin amphora from Hymettos already fill the greater part of the vase surface with the descriptive frieze, only surrounded by narrow lines of ornaments and animals, and in addition the neck of the amphora is adorned with figured scenes. Even in Geometric times Attic pottery had already given greater scope to the narrative style than other manufactures: in the Phaleron vases it creates an important system of decoration, which is continued in the group of which the Nessos vase is the chief representative, and prevails to the exclusion of everything else in the 6th century.
When the later Phaleron vases re-adopt the full silhouette in animal drawing and extend the technique of incised detail and additions in red to human outline figures, which they often emphasize only to make them stand out from the
PLATE XXIII.
Figs. 47 & 48. HERAKLES AND THE CENTAUR NESSOS; THE GORGONS: NECK AND BODY DESIGNS OF AN ATTIC AMPHORA.