[Fig. 55]. RHODIAN JUG. [Fig. 56]. LATE RHODIAN JUG.
[Fig. 57]. EUPHORBOS PLATE FROM RHODES: MENELAOS AND HECTOR FIGHTING OVER THE BODY OF EUPHORBOS.
the animal friezes: the last-named ornament generally takes the place of the rays round the bottom of the vase. With these decorative stripes the Rhodian style at the height of its production likes to cover the whole surface of its favourite jugs with ‘rotelle’ on the handles (Figs. [55] and [56]), its necked amphorae, bowls and other vessels, and in this way arrives at a delicate and rich carpet-like effect: the equipoise between the animal silhouettes neatly placed on the white ground, coloured red and white, and the vigorous clear ornamentation, the showing of the ground through in delicate details where colour is purposely omitted, the well-distributed filling ornaments, into which sometimes small birds with an absence of pedantry are introduced, are all very satisfactory to the decorative sense: the distinction of the shoulder stripe by the heraldic element prevents the impression that the surface of the vase is too uniformly cut up. The accumulation of animal friezes, and the heraldic arrangement of Orientalizing animals round a vegetable combination of ornaments, are features which we have already found in Western art; but while these elements became prominent there at a time when the incised full silhouette was in exclusive possession of the field, when plant decoration took more abstract shapes, and filling patterns were reduced to the rosette, the culmination of the Rhodian animal-frieze vases falls in the pictorial period, when the plant decoration is naturalistic and filling ornamentation is abundant.
A uniform band decoration did not exclusively prevail. A group of jugs, which by its more tense and profiled shape and by a transition to the later floral ornamentation shows itself to be progressive, and which gradually replaces the cable of the neck by the broken so-called ‘metope’ maeander (Fig. [56]), leaves out of the black body of the vase only a narrow stripe with the maeander reduced to pothooks, and surrounds the bottom of the vase with long rays. But beside this method the other certainly persists. Its tenacious life is proved by vases like the Paris cauldron (Fig. [58]) and its parallels from Naukratis, which show the archaic Rhodian band style alongside of the developed incised animal style on the same vase. In these hybrids which are essentially akin to the vases of Andokides ([p. 115]) the old stylizing of the figures is giving way, the rich store of filling motives is yielding to the prevalence of the rosette, the vegetable ornamentation is exchanging its vigorous plant-like appearance for thinner and more abstract shapes, which however take on a freer swing and submit to richer variations, the most important of which is the continuous tendril. At the same time the old technique of painting and leaving void spaces continues to be cultivated at a time, when elsewhere and probably also in the East the black-figured animal style has become the regular thing, and the filling ornamentation combined with it has assumed the blot-like shapes of the Corinthian and Vurvá stage. Finally the Rhodian style also adopts the new fashion.
Thus this style from an early date shows itself extremely decorative and little inclined to actual representations. We should know nothing of them, if the plates, a favourite item in Rhodian fabrication, like their Phoenician metal prototypes, did not exchange the old concentric decoration of stripes for the division into two segments, the larger of which is occasionally adorned with the human figure instead of the usual animal or fabulous creature. The drawing of the figures adopts the method already familiar. The place of outline drawing of the men is taken by brown tinting, e.g., in the heroes fighting in the well-known scheme on the Euphorbos plate (Fig. [57]), while the women retain the old technique, e.g. the Gorgon on a plate in London, which is an adaptation of the Oriental animal goddess, and quite
PLATE XXIX.