At any rate the idea fell on fruitful soil. The archaic mixture of colour was long worn out, the simplification of colour-effect, by increasing limitation to the two values, clay and glaze, was in full swing, and the effect of big glazed surfaces had been tried in the body-amphorae and in vessels completely covered with black colour (p. [108]). But more than all else the revolution in figure-drawing which was now setting in strong in the great art was striving for expression in vase painting. A successor of the Athenian Eumares, Kimon of Kleonai, according to Pliny, invented oblique views and foreshortening, rescued the body from archaic stiffness, furnished limbs with joints, for the first time rendered veins, and represented folds and swellings of drapery; he must belong to the last third of the century; for his predecessor is father of the sculptor Antenor, who worked, it is true, for the old potter Nearchos ([p. 103]) but also for the young Athenian Republic (510 B.C.) Though Pliny, after the fashion of ancient historians, is too fond of asserting ‘inventions,’ this much is clear, that after Eumares there was a breach with tradition in Athenian painting, and that here, for the first time in the history of the world, bonds were once for all burst, which hitherto had hardly been touched. Naturally the vase-painters could not be left behind; but since the old silhouette incised style was quite unsuited for the new liberties of drawing, but on the other hand outline drawing on light ground ran counter to the decorative purposes of the vases which used silhouettes, the idea of inverting the colour-scheme must have been received with enthusiasm among the vase-painters.
The new invention unites the enhanced freedom of movement of the draughtsman with a decorative effect which is not inferior to that of the old style. The warm red inner surface of the figures, which the painter can animate by the brilliant sweeping ‘relief lines,’ splendidly contrasts with the wonderful black lustre of the ground. The new style too is a silhouette style, and uses the ornamental effect of the figures. But it contains quite different possibilities, and of itself moves away from the types of the old style and towards an individual treatment of the figures. The contrast between the black silhouette of the man and the white-filled figure of the woman falls away, also the circular shape of the man’s eye connected with the incised style, the gay dresses, and much besides. The red-figured style enters into the characteristic working out of the human body and its parts, the study of drapery folds and the rendering of movement in a living way. But growing naturalism is in true Greek fashion contemporaneous with adherence to types; formulæ once invented are retained and repeated by different masters, until new discoveries by bolder spirits outdo them and put them in the shade. In the archaic red-figured style this vigorous struggle between formula and bold observation of nature offers an exciting spectacle. Step by step the ground is won from the archaic style, till after a struggle of about fifty years, about the time of the Persian wars, a free rendering of nature is attained, which then lays the foundation for the formation of a new and higher series of types, for the style of Polygnotos and Phidias.
This period may be regarded as the culminating point of vase-painting altogether, if emphasis is laid on the intensity of the line, and on the intimate relation between artist and technique. In it artistic craft had its greatest triumphs and created the most perfect synthesis between ornamental types and delightful naturalism. Potters and painters were never again so conscious of their performances as in this period, never again felt themselves so much as rival individualities. Certainly the old black-figured masters, Timonidas, Klitias, Exekias and Amasis, cannot be denied personal expression. But the red-figured conquerors of nature, each of whom in his own way breaks through the old system of type, produce a far more differentiated effect. It is also a result of the fresh current, which now enters vase-painting, that we can more than ever follow the development of these individualities. The signatures, which are preserved in such number from no other period, give an insight, not merely into the manifold production, but also into the growth of personalities and their struggle for ever new possibilities.
Among the signatures we must distinguish between potters and painters. We must never assume that the ‘maker’ is responsible for the adornment of his vases; it looks rather as if the painters had lived pretty independently and been employed first by one and then by another proprietor of a workshop. What it means, that now the potter signs, now the painter, sometimes both together, and that many strong personalities do not sign at all, cannot be made out in the present state of our knowledge.
The love-names help to fix the chronology of the vases still more than in the black-figured style. We saw that Andokides was kalos, when Timagoras’ workshop was in full swing. When he is a full-blown painter, the ‘Epiktetan’ kylikes and an Oxford plate celebrate the youths Stesagoras, Hipparchos and Miltiades. If Miltiades is the victor of Marathon, Stesagoras his brother, and Hipparchos the archon of 496 B.C., their ephebic years and these vases must be fixed about 520 B.C. Memnon’s youth must fall about the same time; for one of the many kylikes with his name, like a lekythos signed by Gales, shows the bard Anakreon, who was entertained by the Pisistratidae, 522-514 B.C. The painters Phintias and Euthymides praise the youth Megakles; now on a votive pinax from the Acropolis this name was replaced later by another, and it is a plausible guess to connect this erasure with the banishment of a Megakles in 486 B.C., who about twenty-five years before might have deserved these praises. The youthful beauty of Leagros is in the time of the vase-painter Euphronios, and anyhow earlier than the destruction of Miletos, in which a Leagros vase was shattered: the Leagros who fell in battle as Strategos 465 B.C., must have been an ephebus in the last decade of the 6th century. His son Glaukon, who was Strategos in 440 B.C., dates the vases which celebrate him with his father’s name a generation later, so about 470 B.C. The only established fact from finds does not contradict the ‘Leagros’ chronology; in the tumulus of
PLATE LVIII.
[Fig. 103]. ATHENA AND HERAKLES: FROM AN AMPHORA IN THE STYLE OF THE ANDOKIDES PAINTER.
From Furtwängler-Reichhold, Griechische Vasenmalerei.