PLATE LI.
[Fig. 93]. DIONYSOS: INTERIOR OF AN EYE KYLIX BY EXEKIAS.
without division, an arrangement of which the red-figured style makes almost exclusive use. The interior is generally not more richly decorated than by the ‘little masters.’ When Exekias on one vase adorns the whole interior surface with a wonderful idyll, the giver of the vine in a sailing boat with dolphins leaping round him, this is quite an exception (Fig. [93]): that the ground is painted brick-red, is quite unique.
The names Ergotimos and Klitias, Exekias and Amasis, Charitaios, Pamphaios and Nikosthenes show that the manufacture of kylikes was by no means a separate speciality, and that it may be simply due to accident if certain firms producing larger vases do not recur among the ‘little masters.’
The larger masterpieces naturally show the progress of the style much more plainly than the conservative Tyrrhenian ware and the kylikes. We noticed above, that single specimens, which stand out markedly from the ordinary ware of the period, attach themselves to the François vase. The master of a fine lebes from the Acropolis showing Ionic influence, who occasionally still colours the male face red, probably emigrated from the East like his contemporaries Kolchos and Lydos. Like Klitias, the masters prefer to cover garments with rich patterns rather than to render folds: they relieve the monotony of white chitons by vertical strokes, and divide the surfaces of cloaks into stripes. This division does not yet attain any effect of depth. But when Nearchos, the father of two ‘little masters’ (pp. [101] and [112]), divides the short male chiton also by wavy lines into black and red stripes, he has already in his mind the rendering of folds, and Kolchos grades the ends of cloaks with clear folds. This emancipation from the old superficiality, which in the period of the ‘little masters’ leads to the emergence of the ‘fold’ style in the works of Amasis and Exekias, must now be exhibited in a selection of amphorae and hydriae in connection with the change of vase-shapes and decoration.
We begin with the big-bellied amphora, which at the end of the 7th century we saw reserve a square field and decorate it with horses’ or women’s heads, and which in the period of Sophilos begins to put an upper border of ornament on its figure-field, which is often adorned with animals. Fine specimens of the Klitias period, which banish the animal ornament into a lower frieze or give it up altogether, show an obvious change in shape, in that the handles, instead of standing off like ears, are drawn up perpendicularly, while the body of the vase is to some degree tightened. Vases like that of Taleides with the slaying of the Minotaur, or like the unsigned Iliupersis vase in Berlin (Fig. [ 94]) with the gay alternate palmette pattern and the old heavy foot of the François vase, belong to this class. On both vases standing figures form an extension of an animated central group, but the Iliupersis master makes a better whole of his triptych than Taleides, who merely juxtaposes the heroes’ conflict and the spectators: alongside of the furious Neoptolemos, who has already laid one Trojan low and is on the point of despatching the aged king and his grandson with one blow, Menelaos threatens his faithless wife, whom he has won back, while on the other side Priam’s entreaties are supported by wife and daughter: a picture rich in content, of true archaic vividness and talkativeness, excellently drawn and composed. It is not only the way in which white is used that takes one beyond the François vase; the rosette ornamentation of the garments is quite typical of the following period (Fig. [92]); the wavy striping of the short chiton and the simple grading of the cloak reminds us of Nearchos and Kolchos, and whether Klitias could have characterized a dying man as well as our master is at least