masters to recast even the divine figures with a strikingly individual, coarse and almost common effect. The master of the Boston ‘Eos’ kylix, a successor of Makron in Hieron’s studio, makes his undistinguished goddess of the morning be carried off by a spindly street-lad; the Demeter, who on a Munich hydria attends the departure of Triptolemos, betrays little of the sacred beauty of the motherly goddess; and other vase-paintings have almost the effect of conscious caricatures of ideal types.
The new possibilities of ‘Physiognomy’ in differentiating character by the facial type, however, brought the expression of divine nature to its fullest expansion, and helped not merely to make men more human but also gods more divine. A London white-ground kylix from Rhodes (Fig. [129]) is connected with the Bonn lekythos and the Berlin kylix of Euphronios by the common name of Glaukon. The goddess of love, riding through the air on her sacred bird, the goose, is of more than earthly beauty: her hands, not only the one with the flower but the unoccupied left hand, speak the same expressive language as her face and whole form. The effect of this picture is comparable to that of a song. Now for the first time the inner kinship of the art of words with that of pictures presses itself on the observer of works of art. No one will think of comparing the Geometric style with the Homeric Epic in value of expression, or the ornamental style of the 7th century with contemporary Lyric poetry, though one may see a reflection of Anacreontic and ballad feeling in the art of the later 6th century. But the weight of the Aeschylean pathos is as little to be mistaken in works of graphic and plastic art as the Sophoclean glow and pure beauty of line.
The more delicate animation, which this period could bestow on its forms, of itself pointed away from archaic loquacity and pleasure in narration. The genre scene is certainly as old as the historical, and we have seen that there was no difference of principle. The nearer the red-figured style came, the more representations of feeling were combined with representations of action, and towards the end of the archaic style they are no longer rarities. With the new liberation of the style, especially with the enlivening of the eye, a different sort of inward feeling asserts itself. Figures devoid of action, occupied with themselves or contemplating another figure, are themes which the painters of lekythoi in particular were never tired of inventing; and in later times, when the cemetery scenes replaced the domestic ones on these vases, and the privacy of the indoor scenes was transferred to the visit to the grave, the harmony of soul between the visitor and the dead, whose living likeness fancy could not separate from the grave, often found an unspeakably intimate expression ([p. 145]).
The quantity of pictures of ‘pure existence’ does much to determine the altered aspect presented by post-Persian vase-painting. On the slim ‘Nolan’ amphorae and those with twisted handles, on the calyx-kraters and the bell-kraters often decorated on the mouth with a branch, on the ‘stamnoi’ and other vases, which are decorated like the ‘Nolan,’ the slender restful figures heighten the impression of quiet elegance. Thus the grandeur of the new style at the same time gets a marked decorative value, a value not without danger for the living rendering of reality. Greatness is not every man’s affair, and the painters, who only took over externally the big forms and the lofty simplicity, and could not fill them with a life of their own, can only rank as decorative artists and should by the same right be called ‘affected’ as the refined masters of the Amasis period ([p. 106]). Even talented painters consciously gave up to decorative effect the reverses of their vases, which they adorn with quickly drawn motionless figures wrapped in cloaks.
PLATE LXXIX.
[Fig. 131]. THE DEATH OF AKTAION: FROM A RED-FIGURED KRATER.
From Furtwängler-Reichhold, Griechische Vasenmalerei.