kylikes the mixture of technique is rather to be found in the fact, that in the interior the black-figured picture, which with its circle in the colour of the clay contrasted so decoratively with the black-covered edge, was still retained, while outside between the eyes, and gradually also in their place, figures were inserted in the colour of the ground. This procedure is e.g. connected with the names of the potters Nikosthenes, Pamphaios, Hischylos and Chelis, and with the painters’ names Epiktetos and Psiax, and with the love-name Memnon. When Skythes paints the outside in black-figured technique and the inside in red-figured of a kylix (unsigned) dedicated to Epilykos, this is, like the procedure of Andokides, an exception, and a conscious divergence from the traditional relation. The transition to purely red-figured technique compels the artists to separate the interior from the black surroundings. Up to the Leagros period this separation is effected by a narrow ring in the ground of the clay, which they leave uncovered by black paint: on the kylikes the eye-decoration is gradually dropped. If one takes the signatures of the masters of this group together with those of the transitional kylikes and the contemporary big vases, the number of the painters’ names comes to about a dozen, while the potters are far more numerous; and thus in view of the mere accident of preservation and the anonymity of other palpable artistic personalities one can form an idea of the vigorous life, which then reigned in the Kerameikos, the quarter of Athens where the potters lived.
It is interesting to follow the process by which the early red-figured kylikes from very decorative beginnings rise to even greater freedom and objectivity. Even the insertion of the figure between the eyes, which comes from the Ionic ‘Phineus’ fabric, is meaningless and a mere decorative scheme; and also, when he gives up the decoration with eyes, the painter likes to put one or three figures as central motive between the broad ornaments of the handles. Even the exterior pictures with numerous figures, which occur in the late period of the potter Pamphaios and in the full activity of the painter Oltos, are by no means free from decorative schematism; arrangement in a row and heraldry still play a part, and occasionally, as in the ‘little master’ style, winged horses or sirens take the centre of the representation. Even the old Ionic scheme of the horse-holding runner revives on a kylix of this group.
The interior too at first is still under strong decorative constraint.
Quite in contrast to the early Attic kylikes of the Klitias period and to the Spartan, which often take no regard to the space in the representation, the figure always adapts itself to the circular form, extends its masses to fit the space, often presses head and feet against the edge, and gives the interior a decorative and very animated appearance, to some extent comparable to a rotating wheel. One imagines the painters had studied and sketched the bending, crouching, running, twisting, and turning of handsome youths often only to get motives for their interior scenes. Skythes, the master of fine black-figured votive tablets on the Acropolis, who liked to dedicate his kylikes to his young colleague the painter Epilykos, in the interior of the kylix at Rome (Fig. [110]) goes beyond this stage, and fills the space more loosely with the lyre held at right angles and the freely arranged knotted stick of his singing boy; and Epiktetos, who painted his wonderfully subtle figures in a long working life for various potters, Nikosthenes, Hischylos, Pamphaios, Python and Pistoxenos, in the late Python kylix in London (Fig. [111]), under the influence of later masters, goes over to the two figure picture. One can see from their bodies that they are prior to the time of Euphronios and Euthymides. In his
PLATE LXV.
[Fig. 112]. HETAIRAI: FROM A PSYKTER BY EUPHRONIOS.
From Furtwängler-Reichhold, Griechische Vasenmalerei.