Of the other painters of this period, we must content ourselves with naming three, the Berlin master, Makron, and the Bronze-Foundry master. The ‘master of the Berlin amphora’ even surpasses Duris in elegance, and is fond of introducing his slim elastic figures in ‘Nolan’ style, i.e. isolated on a dark background.
Makron, who painted almost all the vases on which Hieron’s signature as potter is found, studied by choice in the Palaestra, where boys performed gymnastics and were addressed by older men. A Berlin kylix (Fig. [123]), like several works of his hand, introduces us to Bacchic revelry, an excited chorus of drunken and vigorously gesticulating maenads, whose bodies are not concealed by the rustling pomp of folds: the ‘kolpos’ or fold of the chiton drawn up through the belt, which Brygos also is fond of, is more transparent than the upper and lower parts of the complicated garment. These figures in which all is life, movement and expression, should be compared with those of the Andokides painter or even those of Euphronios, in order to realize, how in these few decades the liberation from archaic stiffness and adherence to type was almost tempestuously accomplished.
We take leave of the archaic styles with the charming picture of an anonymous painter, the ‘master of the bronze foundry,’ who on a Berlin kylix (Fig. [125]) transplants us into the interior of the workshop of a sculptor in bronze. A workman is poking the oven, another is handling the bellows, the assistant looks on, the master is working at a statue, not yet fully put together: so intimate is the contact with life in this scene. Everything interested the vase-painters of this time equally; they have spread out before us human life, got their material from every quarter, and wherever they laid hold of it, it was interesting. How closely they came to grips with their subject, how they tried to be clear, and to give a lively picture of what they saw, and how under their hands the object at once changed into the artistic type, the human body into the clearly defined study of the nude, the garment into a thing of decorative life, and an assemblage of human beings into an ornamental figure composition!
PLATE LXXV.
[Fig. 124]. SCHOOL-SCENE: FROM A KYLIX BY DURIS.
[Fig. 125]. BRONZE-FOUNDRY: FROM A KYLIX WITH THE “LOVE-NAME” OF DIOGENES.