Both encouraged and warned by such examples, one must look through the vase-painting of this period for other traces of Polygnotan painting, especially on vases which agree in subject with the wall-paintings of which we have accounts, and not only in the freedom named, but also in the inferiority of the execution to the conception, show of what spirit they are the offspring. One can never expect copies. The very fact that exact replicas never occur among the Polygnotan types, shows that the vase-painters dealt with the borrowed property according to their own individuality and for their definite purpose. So the two cases we have selected must be judged individually. The ‘Penthesileia’ master was probably stimulated to his treatment of the theme by a big Amazon painting; but the clever painter not merely translated this impulse into his own brilliant technique and adapted it to his circular field, but also extended over it his personal great feeling, and translated the picture into his personal style, so that it has the effect of a natural continuation of his earlier works. The ‘Argonaut’ master had no concern with this great ‘Ethos’ or the delicate polychrome technique. He borrowed more superficially, took an extract from the big scene of his model in his strong relief-lines, and emphasized the individual characteristics rather than the dash of the original. In realism, his bearded hero holding a spear is not inferior to the contemporary warrior of the New York krater (Fig. [130]). Great painting went on tempestuously developing, and in the next age burst its fetters of colour and space in a manner which could not but deter even the boldest vase-painter from imitation, if he were not to shake off every sane regard for the preservation of his surface-effect. So reflexions of wall-painting on vases become rarer, and the ‘Polygnotan’ vases remain an episode.
Naturally there were many vase-painters who did not enter this dangerous ground: nay, the majority did not do so. With many the avoidance of a big surface went so far that they divided the outside of a calyx-krater or big ‘aryballos’ into two friezes and filled them with small figures in defiance of constructive considerations. Out of the series of these ‘little masters,’ who beside the big-figure painters continued the traditions of the elegant style, let us mention e.g. the painter who decorated the box signed by the potter Megakles (Fig. [ 136-7]) with charming scenes from women’s apartments, and the lid with five comic hares; or the author of the girl plying the top on a white-ground kylix of the potter Hegesibulos (Fig. [133]), a potter who was active as early as the Leagros period; and especially Sotades, from whose workshop came not only plastic vases in the shapes of horses, sphinxes, knuckle-bones, crocodiles devouring negroes, etc., but also white-ground kylikes of most elegant shape, whose exquisite interiors, like the friezes of those
PLATE LXXXIII.
LID AND SIDE OF A PYXIS WITH THE SIGNATURE OF THE POTTER MEGAKLES.
[Fig. 138]. MAENADS: FROM A RED-FIGURED POINTED AMPHORA.