Anonymous masters better represent the transition from Polygnotos to Pheidias. The master of a krater with a dancing scene in Rome (the ‘Villa Giulia’ master), is not distinguished for temperament and progressiveness, but is rather a correct and academic individual; but the neatly drawn scenes of his krater and stamnoi, in the noble bearing of the figures and the manner in which they gaze at each other, betray the approach of a new ideal of man. Much more talented is the master, who on a pointed amphora at Paris combined the wonderful group of two Maenads (Fig. [138]) with a scene of Bacchic revelry, as Amasis did almost a century before (Fig. [98]). The two girls are of truly royal dignity, like each other in this, but subtly distinguished in expression. The three-quarter view of the head is almost devoid of harshness, and only the ladle-shaped under lip connects her with the Polygnotan female heads.
How even the drapery becomes a vehicle of expression and every fold breathes the greatness of the whole picture, may become clearer if we look at the ‘Eriphyle’ of a pelike at Lecce (Fig. [139]), with which we also pass the middle of the century. This picture must be compared to the Corinthian Amphiaraos krater (Fig. [66]) to see, how in the interval of 120-130 years the soul of art has changed. The later master represents not the dramatic culmination of the story but the psychological climax, when Polyneikes offers to the wife of Amphiaraos the seductive necklace, for which she will send her husband to death. As often on vases of this period, two figures stand calmly facing one another, but they are here united by most delicate psychology; Eriphyle, simply attired in plain peplos, is full of an inner life which circulates through her body to the finger-tips. This harmonious union of a monumental type with intimate feeling is at the beginning of the most Greek period of Greek art-history, the most human period of the history of mankind, the age of Pheidias.
If we name the following decades of the history of vase-painting after Pheidias, we do not mean that he was in very close relations with the art of the vase-painters. But the artist, who in the Parthenon frieze introduced that inconceivable nobility of form, who in the West side of the frieze developed the play of lines to new greatness, to heighten it in the pediment to a great outburst of passion, impressed this age so much with his nature that one cannot imagine the vase-paintings as unaffected by this powerful influence.
Never was Greek art so much an art of expression as at this period. As if in response to the search for a word to describe this new expression, the beautiful musical pictures of the time present themselves. Since the Geometric style art had continually represented musical performers, but it was reserved for the age of Pheidias to give pictorial expression to the effect of musical sounds on men. The krater from Gela (Fig. [140]) belongs to the early Periclean age; the sure touch in the rendering of a twist of the body and its rounded form is now a matter of course even in the hasty execution of a second-rate draughtsman; the head type gets the
PLATE LXXXV.
[Fig. 141]. MUSIC: RED-FIGURED NECKED AMPHORA.
