PLATE XXXVI.
HERAKLES AND GERYONEUS: FROM A CHALKIDIAN AMPHORA.
Fig. 71. THE SLAYING OF KYKNOS BY HERAKLES: FROM A CHALKIDIAN AMPHORA.
expressive and characteristic. To be sure the contrast between the body in front view and the legs in profile and the spreading over the surface are still hardly toned down, but the thrust dealt with the right arm, the clutch of the left, the foot pressed against the back of the opponent’s knee are full of vigour, and the collapse of the bleeding son of Ares, his prayer for mercy while he plucks the victor’s beard, the dimmed eye with its pathos, the composition and the filling of the space are very artistic.
This heightening of characteristic touches does not merely appear in battle scenes, but also the intimate touches in many Corinthian subjects are carried on. Even the Eurytios krater had succeeded in expressing the horror which seizes Odysseus and Diomede at the sight of the suicide of Aias. The feeling in this group is perhaps surpassed by an episode in a Chalkidian battle-scene; where the intent care, with which Sthenelos binds up the finger of the wounded Diomede, reminds one of the later kylix of Sosias (Fig. [114]); and when a Paris amphora enlarges the march out to battle by a domestic scene of arming, early red-figured painting is again anticipated.
The combination of this fresh and direct observation of nature with a marked decorative talent unites Chalkidian with the Ionic art of the islands. On Chalkidian soil, where a language with a strong Ionic element was spoken, a close contact with eastern neighbours must be assumed. It is not only the chain of buds on the vases that witnesses to this contact. The Satyr, a hairy fat fellow, with marked horse-ears and horse-tail, often with horse-hoofs, enters from the East in a form, which meets us on the Phineus vase (Fig. [74]). And when the Chalkidian painter occasionally indicates the outline of the female back, where previously the drapery falling straight down entirely concealed it, when he furnishes his Geryon with wings and often equips Herakles with the lion’s skin, in this, as in much besides, one cannot fail to see Eastern influence. Whether the rendering of folds, the beginnings of which appear on Chalkidian vases as elsewhere, has the same origin, is doubtful.