between his favourite squatting sphinxes a fighting warrior, a couple of dancers, or two running girls, when he composes heraldically the heads of two processions of riders, and makes a combatant the central motive of heraldic riders, when he invents animal combinations with a common head. So it is no wonder if he makes into an effective motive of decoration the apotropaic eyes popular in this phase of art, which we know from Delian, Melian, and Rhodian vases of the 7th century (Fig. [ 57]), if he often adds ears and nose, and fills the centre with an arbitrarily chosen motive, a leaf or a human figure. The eyes are found on the necks of amphorae, but very often as outside decoration of the kylix, which in perfected specimens shows alike the height and the end of this manufacture.
The wonderfully living and swelling outline of these delicate kylikes (Fig. [72]) may be taken as a symbol of the style of the figures, which is absolutely remote from abstract dryness. It often enough adopts Corinthian-Chalkidian types as models. The ‘Phineus’ painter did not invent of himself the warrior with head in front view; the slaying of Troilos goes back to an old Corinthian type; the pursuit of the mounted Penthesileia introduces, it is true, a new Eastern Amazon type in place of the old one (which is also used in this group), but is based on the composition of a Corinthian battle picture. What the ‘Phineus’ painter does with his models is always distinguished by individual and genuinely Ionic life. On the group of amphorae a fine vigorous figure style prevails, which on the kylikes has a finer and at the same time more delicate development. The charming Athena (Fig. [73]), who now appears in armour, and whose shield-edge the painter for decorative reasons has doubled, the Scythian who like the mounted Amazon is at home in East Greece, the skipping Silenus, the dog in front view would not tell us much of this kylix-style. But fortunately the painter of the Phineus kylix surrounded the fine Silenus mask in the interior with a continuous frieze, the lack of which a hundred contemporary vases could not outweigh. The wall with the vine and the lion’s head plainly divides the frieze into two scenes: evidently a magic well, which pours wine into the cup of the delighted Satyr. A lion, a panther and two stags draw the chariot of the Wine-god and his consort. On the legendary team a Satyr is making mischief; two of his colleagues are quite diverted from their duty by the sight of three nymphs, who are bathing at a spring in a wood. A lion’s head as spout pours into a basin the water with which they are laving themselves; their clothes they have already hung up. The other picture shows the blind king Phineus, from whom the Harpies have taken the food off the table, for which he is vainly feeling; the valiant sons of Boreas pursue the impudent thieves through the air over the sea.
All is living, original and drastic in its conception, as perhaps was only possible for an Ionian. The movements of the Satyrs and the nude maidens, the animals and plant-life are caught from nature, and this study betrays itself in various details. The face of Phineus, still painted red like that of the Satyrs, is drawn in front view, which we have hitherto only found in the helmeted warrior’s head, the collar-bone and chest muscles are rendered, the eyes of the Boreads are already much reduced in scale. Especially important is the treatment of the drapery, not to mention the linen chiton of Dionysos with its parallel lines indicating the material, or the long red chitons of the women and the curved outline of the shirts of the Boreads, or the garments of the Harpies adorned with Ionic crosses and borders; important innovations appear in the himatia, that of Phineus is divided into
PLATE XXXVIII.
PHINEUS; DIONYSOS: FRIEZE ROUND THE INTERIOR OF AN IONIC EYE KYLIX.
From Furtwängler-Reichhold, Griechische Vasenmalerei.