the stern eye of Arkesilas, and stowed in the hold of a sailing ship to be exported. The monkey too, which the painter puts on the yard, he became acquainted with in Africa; the birds are not meaningless but fly round the ship; only the lizard is an external addition, and we already know it to be Corinthian. The life-like picture, which before the decisive excavations in Sparta was regarded as chief proof of Cyrenaic origin for this pottery, confirms the result of digging in the shape of the chair legs, which agree with Spartan reliefs, and in the inscription, only possible in Sparta. There is an approximate date given too; for the king, whose portrait we have, reigned about the middle of the 6th century. With this it agrees that his mantle is divided into black and red stripes, which, as we saw in the Phineus kylix, comes before the rendering of folds.
This conservative style does not show the same keenness as its contemporaries in rendering folds and developing the knowledge of anatomy; nor is the need felt for a long time of freeing the field from filling ornaments or the base segment from animal decoration. The group of vases which belongs to the second half of the century is especially marked by the return of the white slip and of polychromy in the ornamentation. It is only late that the Spartan painters turn to the rendering of folds and richer body details, really only in a time of decadence, which diminishes the foot, no longer colours the ornament, and often avoids the base-segment. The occasional use of pale red figures painted on a black ground with incised details can only be explained as a provincial imitation of Attic red-figured technique, with the superiority of which Sparta cannot even remotely compete. Similar vases without any figures show the last output of the fabric.
The only fabric in which the black-figured style completed its life and exhausted its possibilities, the only one which shows its living force through the archaic and classic periods, is the Attic. Even at the end of the 7th century it begins to vie with others. We already saw that Vurvá vases were exported to East Ionia; the Gorgon lebes of the Louvre comes from Italy. Etruria now becomes the chief place where Attic and indeed all black-figured vases are found. The fact that ware made to be exported to Etruria first gave us the knowledge of Greek vase-painting, led enquiries on false tracks for a long time in localizing the fabrics, and even to-day the word ‘vases’ reminds us of the decisive finds on Italian soil.
The Attic manufactory is, as we saw, proved not only by the alphabet of their inscriptions but also by continuous finds in Attica itself. To be sure, the inequality of production in technique and style obtrudes itself on us here more than elsewhere, and makes us take fabric in a wider sense, as a complex of workshops, which turn out at the same time good and rubbishy ware, traditional and progressive painting, vases with light or dark-red clay. The Boeotian workshops, without doing them injustice, we may class with Attic workshops of the second class; in the 6th century, in so far as they do not go on turning out their old bird kylikes ([p. 52]), they are only provincial offshoots of Attic industrial art. The same is the case with Eretria.
The inequality of Attic ware has yet other reasons. More than other fabrics the Attic adopted foreign influences. Athens’ central position between Corinth, Chalkis and the Cyclades, its relations to East Ionia, led to a penetration of old Attic art traditions with other elements and to the formation of a new style: the rise of trade and industry enticed alien painters to settle at Athens, since foreign fabrics had more and more to give in to Athenian superiority. Thus it is that Corinthian, Chalkidian, ‘Phineus,’ East Ionic, occasionally even Spartan fabrics
PLATE XLVII.
[Fig. 86]. WEDDING OF PELEUS: FRAGMENTS OF A CAULDRON BY SOPHILOS.
