PLATE LXXVI
[Fig. 126]. CENTAUROMACY: FROM A RED-FIGURED KYLIX.
CHAPTER VI.
THE STYLE OF POLYGNOTOS AND PHEIDIAS
IN the studio of Euphronios the so-called ‘Horse master’ painted a kylix now in Berlin with the praise of the fair Glaukon. The outside is decorated in the usual red-figured technique with lively scenes of riders and stables, the inside (a youth and a girl) is rendered in outline, with coloured interior lines and surfaces, on the ground covered with a white slip. The progress in the rendering of bodies and drapery is unmistakeable; the oblique view of the female breast is almost correctly caught, the material of the cloaks is packed in lost folds with bent-round end. But even the whole conception of the figures goes far beyond the archaic art of the pre-Persian time: the proportions and faces have a touch of greatness, beside which all preceding art seems narrow and embarrassed. The simplification of the profile and the severe long lower part of the face essentially determine one’s impression of the heads. A new period is announcing itself: a time of progressive naturalism and at the same time a period of noble greatness of style and exalted types. The statements of the ancients as to the great painting of this age, of Polygnotos and his company, lay stress on these qualities; not only the progress, which relieves the rendering of body and garment of the old stiffness, but the great Ethos of these paintings is praised. So with good reason we call the vase painting of the post-Persian generation Polygnotan, even if at the beginning of this epoch the influence of the great art is not felt so much as at its culmination.
The name of Glaukon, which we have met with on the Euphronios kylix of Berlin, recurs on a series of vases, almost always in the two-line arrangement, which comes now into vogue, and often in combination with his father Leagros’ name. Lekythoi, or slender oil-flasks, which now become the regular offering for graves, and when so employed invariably use the white-ground technique of the Berlin kylix, afford several examples of this favourite’s name, which has become the hinge of vase-chronology. On a Bonn fragment (Fig. [128]), which in the older style has a domestic scene, not one taken from the cemetery, and paints the flesh in white, a woman is sitting in an arm-chair and putting on a golden necklace, which the handmaid in front of her has offered in a box. The face of this woman signifies a new world: the archaic types are discarded, the old traditions replaced by a quite individual almost portrait-like conception. The eye, which has hardly any traces of the old full-view and puts the pupil entirely into the open inner corner, gives the face a very natural and living effect, it is really looking: and the hair hanging out from the cap in confusion, the profile not dominated by any canon of beauty, and the drawing of the hands, show the painter penetrated by the same effort after truth. It is perhaps an idle question, what period inaugurates the history of Greek portraiture, since each innovation taken from the model individualizes the traditional type; but it is just the vase-paintings of the post-Persian, Kimonian age, which went further than the later ones in thus individualizing. The woman of the Glaukon lekythos, the old woman on a skyphos in Schwerin from the workshop of Pistoxenos (Fig. [127]) and on a loutrophoros in Athens, the head of a warrior from a krater in New York (Fig. [130]) may be taken as symptoms of a very personal portraiture in the age of Kimon. The effort to get rid of the traditional ideal types led a series of these
