The East Greek manner took the place of the Corinthian in Italy at the beginning of the 7th century. This revolution is less connected with importation than with the immigration of Ionic artists. But even the new current is more and more open to the influence of the ever-spreading Attic importation, which in the East and West not merely captures the market but also forces production under its spell.
Before we pass to this victorious fabric, we must once more return to Peloponnesus, to a fabric standing in isolation and of marked peculiarity, the Spartan. Excavations at Sparta show the transition to the black-figured style, such as took place elsewhere about the end of the 7th century. Corinth seems to have set the example for this transition;
PLATE XLIV.
Figs. 82 & 83. PARIS AND HIS HERD; PRIAM AND HERMES LEAD HERA, ATHENA AND APHRODITE BEFORE PARIS: FROM A PONTIC AMPHORA.
From Furtwängler-Reichhold, Griechische Vasenmalerei.
at all events Corinthian elements, e.g. riders with birds for space-filling in the black-figured style give this indication, though the conservative retention of the white slip and the inconsistent rendering of the male eye clearly distinguish it from Corinthian. It becomes really tangible to us at the period, when exportation properly begins, at a time which already puts a black wash under imposed white and with the shapes takes us further along into the 6th century. The ware for exportation, which spread far over the mainland to Naukratis and Samos as well as to Etruria, has given us only a few big vases, finely decorative works, which are very conservative in their adornment. The earliest of them is a Paris ‘lebes’ with heraldically arranged animal-frieze and a frieze of figures above it, in which pot-bellied topers are placed between the Troilos story and a Centaur battle; two volute kraters and two hydriae, by their shapes, cannot be much later. Broad tongues adorn shoulder and foot, the rays are doubled, to Geometric zig-zag and hooked bands are added upright arched friezes of lotus and pomegranate, continuous branches, and the lotus and palmette pattern; the animal friezes have types of their own and do not avoid the processional order not ordinarily favoured in the West. Even the larger vases found in actual Spartan sanctuaries are almost entirely decorative and show little of the figure painting coming in so vigorously in other manufactories.
A compensation for this is offered by the number of kylikes preserved, which in the 6th century, as in East Ionia, Corinth and Athens, so also in Sparta, gradually pass into the high-stemmed shape with offset rim (Fig. [80]). The outsides of these kylikes are adorned only in a few earlier specimens with antithetic or processional animal friezes, otherwise only with the simple or net-like pomegranate pattern, with lotus leaves and rays; from the handles proceed palmettes on their sides. The figures are entirely confined to the interior, which much more commonly than in other manufactories, rises out of pure ornamentation or animal decoration to free scenic representations. To be sure this is often at the expense of the decorative effect. Most scenes are anything but composed with a view to a round space, and the segments under the line which marks the level of the ground, often very clumsily filled with plant and animal ornamentation, the rosettes, filling flowers, and birds dispersed without meaning about the scene, are always clumsy old-fashioned compromises between representation and space-filling. The stock of figures, with which the painter decorates his interiors, usually more or less at random, is even in its rendering helpless and antiquated; to make up it preserves its independence and ease, its primitive solidity; the strong warriors, riders and hunters, the men carousing with women, the musicians and drinkers, the girls bathing in the river, are in subject and execution truly Spartan. Beside the pictures from daily life comes mythology with pot-bellied dancers, who have not yet, so far as we know, been superseded by Ionic Satyrs, with Erotes crowning riders and drinkers, and various legendary scenes.