from the traditions of the brilliant Geometric period, which remained longer operative in the very ceramic and non-metallic Attic school than in the Argive-Corinthian, one suspects also influences from Eastern Greece. According to the evidence of vase finds, Athens was then in connection with Naukratis. Thus one may refer the painting of white on the figures, which is only occasionally employed at Corinth, but on the Vurvá vases often takes the place of the red, to the influence of the East, which had long known it, and explain in the same way many a similarity with the East in the motley array of animals.
Beside the common ware, purely decorative, technically trivial and poor, naturally the subject-vases went on, as at Corinth. It is not only the ‘runners with bent knee’ mingled with the animals, the draped men and riders, who maintain the connection with the older figure-painting; the traditions of the Nessos vase and its parallels continued on big and carefully executed vases. These vases are to Attic pottery, what the works of Timonidas were to Corinthian; they give up filling ornament, individualize the world of figures out of its ornamental constraint, give the subject-style the spatial freedom, which it needs for its evolution. Just as we could follow this transitional style in Corinth on a vase and pinax of Timonidas, so it meets us in Attica at the same time in vases with decoration in bands, necked amphorae, kraters, and cauldrons, and in big-bellied amphorae with special field for the subject, which take the place, in some measure, of sepulchral votive ‘pinakes,’ and are decorated with a female bust or a horse’s head, placed on a panel reserved in the black ground. This vase with special field, which arose from the needs of representation, only transitorily enters the service of animal decoration, and then becomes the chief vehicle of the new style, whose beginning we have reached with the last-named vases.
Attic pottery of the 7th century exercised great influence upon its Boeotian and Eretrian neighbours, where an independent artistic spirit never existed. One might describe these dependent manufactories as provincial branches of the Attic, had they not been influenced by other models as well. The big Boeotian amphorae with tall broad neck, the decoration of which consists chiefly of a pictorial frieze at the level of the handles, divided vertically, are imitated from vases of the islands ([p. 25]). The best known instance, from Thebes, shows on one side the Oriental goddess flanked by lions, on the other a flying bird and spiral ornamentation. This metope decoration with flying birds and Orientalizing volutes and palmettes called forth a special Boeotian class, which some conservative workshops went on producing with great tenacity to the end of the 6th century. It excels in tall-stemmed kylikes with white slip and colour accessories in red and yellow. Other workshops, like those of Pyros and Mnasalkes, imitated the Protocorinthian and Corinthian wares, quantities of which were imported; in the 6th century one enters an Attic sphere of influence. Similarly Attic and island influences are found side by side at the neighbouring Eretria in Euboea.
The Cycladic manufactory, to which the Boeotian and Eretrian imitations point, cannot yet be followed beyond the early Orientalizing stage. On the amphorae with white slip already described, to which class belongs the Stockholm vase with the roebuck (Fig. [50]), and on the closely allied griffin jug from Aegina (Fig. [51]), severely stylized flowers and tendrils enter the not very rich Geometric ornament, the new cable meets the old meander in the same frieze, rows of triangles are enclosed by spirals; in the metopes of the shoulder stripe appear, surrounded by scanty filling ornaments, simple animal representations,
PLATE XXV.
[Fig. 51]. CYCLADIC JUG WITH GRIFFIN’S HEAD FROM ÆGINA.
generally birds, also feeding animals, heraldic or fighting lions, pairs of panthers in heraldic scheme, in the characteristic partial silhouette, which renders the head and parts of the body in outline, but the skins with black or white spots according to the technique. The Ram jug from Aegina (Fig. [28]), the exact attribution of which is uncertain, is at any rate closely allied.