CHAPTER IV.
THE BLACK-FIGURED STYLE
ARCHAIC art, the wonderful offspring of the contact of Greek civilization with the East, exercises its charm to-day more than ever. We have ceased to ascribe a unique saving grace to the classic period, the period of full bloom, and to allow no independent value to the preceding century except as an inevitable transitional phase. We love these archaic works of sculpture and painting for their own sake, not in spite of their crudities but just because of their unpolished hidden vigour, because of the precious combination of their essential features. The fetters of space, and the strong tradition of an ornamental early period give them a monumental effect, which has nothing of mummified stiffness but is kept ever fresh and youthful by an eminently progressive spirit and an energetic endeavour to attain freedom. The archaic style ‘with fresh boldness goes beyond its Oriental patterns, is ever making fresh experiments, and thus exhibits constant change and progress. It is always full of serious painstaking zeal, it is always careful, takes honest trouble, is exactly methodical: the language which it speaks always tells of inward cheerfulness and joy at the result of effort, the effect produced by independent exertion. There is something touching in the sight of archaic art with its child-like freshness, its painstaking zeal, its reverence for tradition, and yet its bold progressiveness. What a contrast to Oriental and Egyptian art, which are fast bound in tradition: in the one the sweltering air of dull coercion, in the other the fresh atmosphere of freedom’ (Furtwängler).
The history leading up to the origin of this style has become clear to us by quarrying in different localities. We saw the vases lose their peculiarly carpet-like appearance, the filling motives disappear, the bands of animals and ornaments forfeit their independence and become a subordinate member in the tectonic construction, we saw the world of figures win its way out of ornamental compulsion to greater freedom and extend over the vase. The 6th century, to the beginnings of which we pursued the history of vases, knows only occasionally inserted rosettes, or a lonely bud projecting into the field. Plant ornamentation becomes true Greek ornament, abstract, tectonic, and when occasion demands, full of life with its swing. Animal friezes retire to the foot or the shoulder, are often incidentally treated as mere decorative accessories or seized by quite unheraldic liveliness. The principal interest is devoted to depicting man, his doings and goings on. The vase painter is now more anxious than ever to narrate and depict; he finds ever less satisfaction in ornamental composition. He is never tired of describing hunting and warfare, wrestling and chariot-racing, the festal dance and procession, but with greatest preference, remembering the purpose of his vases, drinking and wild dancing. But also the heroes of past ages, their bold exploits and strange adventures, are his constant theme. The Homeric Epic, the tales of Herakles the mighty, the bold Perseus and Bellerophon, had evoked pictorial representations even in the 7th century; but now the full stream of the legendary treasury pours into painting and gives an infinitely rich material to the joy of narration.
What the vase-painter makes of this material is never conceived in the historical or archæological spirit, but breathes entirely the air of his own time; often only the added names (which according to the new feeling for space assume smaller dimensions) raise a genre scene into one from myth. Moreover the Saga is only seldom re-shaped by inventive brains. Types once invented pass on, go from workshop to workshop, from one district to another, are abbreviated ([p. 49]), expanded, conventionally repeated or filled with new life. Types may also cross; there arise purely through art, contaminations of legend, which are foreign to poetry. When a Corinthian painter unites the Embassy to Achilles (Iliad IX) with the visit of Thetis, this has as little to do with poetry, as when on Attic vases the birth of Athena is coupled with the apotheosis of Herakles, or the slaying of Troilos is transferred to Astyanax, or the entombment of the dead Sarpedon to Memnon. But everything strange need not be misunderstanding on the artist’s part. The vases supply us with a multitude of legendary motives and variations, which we cannot find in literature, and are the faithful reflex of the fluidity of Greek mythology, which, devoid of canon and dogmatism, was in constant flux.
Olympos too, is subject to these vicissitudes. Its gods live a human life among men, the only difference being that some representative scenes give them a stiffer and more elaborate appearance than that of ordinary mortals. In early times the divinity is chiefly betokened by inscriptions and attributes. On the painting of the Corinthian Kleanthes stood Poseidon with a fish in his hand beside Zeus in labour. Late observers of this picture failed to understand this external characterization of the sea-god, and saw an act of brotherly sympathy with the god’s pains in this holding up of the tunny; and thus a great deal beside must have appeared strange to them, e.g. Apollo with the great lyre still bearded in the 7th century (Fig. [52]), Herakles without lion-skin (Fig. [64]), the unarmed Athena, who only at the beginning of the 6th century, in contrast with the Chigi vase (Fig. [37]), the Aegina bowl and the Gorgon lebes ([p. 49]), begins to express her bellicose nature by attributes, and much besides.
The favourite god of the drinking vessels is the wine-god with cup and vine. He makes Hephaistos drunk and leads him back to Olympos to liberate Hera from the magic chair. The big-bellied dancers and purely human creatures, who form his escort on Corinthian vases, in the first third of the century are superseded by the Ionic horse-men, the Satyrs, who become ever more closely associated with Dionysos, celebrate feasts with the Maenads, never despise the gifts of their master, and make fair nymphs pay for it. The half-bestial creature in whom ancient Greek fancy vigorously incorporates man’s pleasure in wine and women with all its comic effects, is quite the patron of archaic vase-painting.
That all these representations were developed by vase-painting alone is more than improbable. That the Bacchic scenes of toping and dancing were created on the actual vase, is most likely; but one is often enough compelled to assume other sources. The fight of Herakles with the lion, for instance, in its oldest form is the borrowing of an Oriental type, which is composed for a tall rectangle, and is expanded by the vase-painters for their purposes by filling figures, ‘spectators.’ The gifted artist, who gave this heraldic type the more natural impress which was regular in the older black-figured style, was perhaps a vase-painter; the creator of the later black-figured type was certainly not, for his horizontal group is certainly a fine invention but always has to be adapted artificially to the vase surface. As with the wrestling of Herakles, so it is with Theseus’ struggle with the Minotaur. The same sort of extension occurs on a favourite subject of older black-figured style, the quadriga in front view, whose horses heraldically turn their heads sideways, whose helmeted warrior is in front view while the unhelmeted driver is in profile. This type, certainly invented for a square, is also known in bronze and stone relief, and the question, in what technique it first appeared, will scarcely be answered in favour of vase-painting. For a square, too, the finely compact group of Herakles wrestling with Triton was first composed, a theme common on Attic vases from the hydria of Timagoras onwards; the older wrestling scheme, superseded by this type, in its Herakles spread out before the eyes of the observer and kneeling as he wrestles, still shows strong affinity with the Orientalizing frieze compositions ([p. 46]), and is for vase decoration much more typical than the later invention, which on vases always has a ‘borrowed’ effect. The dependence of vase-painting on other techniques is finally evidenced by the so-called ‘couplings’: the best-known instance is the combination of the departure of Amphiaraos with the Funeral-games of Pelias on a Corinthian (Fig. [66]), an Attic and an Ionic vase, a combination which is borrowed from an inlaid wooden chest of Corinthian workmanship at Olympia (‘the chest of Kypselos’) or a prototype from which both were derived.
After all this one will not hesitate to look for a strong reflex of the great art of painting on the vases, alongside of the special property of the vase-painter and typical ornamental figures equally common to all art, or to picture to oneself wall-paintings or easel pictures, like the birth of Athena by Kleanthes, after the fashion of the best vase-paintings, which are least constrained by ornamental considerations, or to reconstruct from the copies of vase-painters compositions like the Destruction of Troy (Iliupersis), the Return of Hephaistos, the Reception of Herakles into Olympos. One is particularly impelled this way, when the vases give now shorter, now longer, extracts from the same large composition; thus we have a reflection on some dozen vases of Exekias and his successors of the fine representation of the heroes Aias and Achilles surprised by the Trojans while deeply absorbed in a game of draughts, and warned by Athena just in time (Fig. [96]). One cannot conceive of any difference of principle in perspective, in the rendering of the body and the drapery, in the spiritual content, between vase-painting and free painting; they both are children of one time. Nor did the vase-painter feel any necessity to alter the composition of his patterns. Only as he had to decorate framed bands, the law of isocephalism was more binding for him than for the great art. Hence his strong disinclination for “landscape,” which we often meet with in Corinthian and Ionian pinakes and wall-painting, but on the vases never, or only in palpable caricature; the painter who on a hydria from Caere copied a seascape with the Rape of Europa, was obliged to place beside the figure what looks like a mole-hill but is intended for a mountain.
This limitation of the possibilities of composition by decorative considerations was of hardly any importance. The wide gulf between free painting and vase picture was conditioned in the first instance by technique. It was that which gave its special effect to the black-figured style and set its stamp upon it. We saw previously that vase-painting, when it took over the silhouette style from the decorative animal frieze, increased its distance from free painting, under whose spell it had been for a good part of the 7th century, that with the incised technique it took over, e.g. the circular drawing of the eye, and with the new colouring entered decorative paths (pp. [38], [44], [49]). Free painting drew with the brush on light ground, used black and white very sparingly, more frequently red, blue, green, yellow and brown; placed these colours side by side in simple harmonies, with very little gradation and shading, but also sometimes, e.g. to represent fire, used the smooth brush; rendered the men in reddish brown, women, children, animals and objects in light colouring. With this free-coloured effect the black-figured style was neither able nor anxious to compete. Just like the Geometric, it is in its own fashion again an ornamental style, which does not disown its predominantly decorative character. The figure silhouettes serve it as ornaments to fill a given space, which are in a certain equipoise of colour in relation to the rest of the decoration and the black painted parts of the vase; the incision stipulates a sharp delineation of types, the imposed colour gives a parti-coloured effect. The coloured effect of the vases is essentially defined by the clay, which now, in the developed black-figured style, takes on a brilliant warm red upper surface, and by the black glaze, which assumes a metallic lustre. The darker colouring of the clay deprives the lighter parts of their effects by contrast, and compels the painters to replace the contour-drawing of women, linen garments, etc., gradually by laying on white colour, with which at first the contour is simply filled; but afterwards more commonly black underpainting is overlaid. With the transition to white, clear silhouettes are also obtained, which set off against the background more effectively than the old contour figures.