PLATE LXXXVI.
[Fig. 142]. SLEEP AND DEATH CARRY OUT A WARRIOR TO BURIAL: WHITE-GROUND LEKYTHOS.
square outline, the shortened jaw, the long drawn nose, which are characteristic of the age of Pheidias; the repetition of the epithet kalos shows that the custom of inscribing a love-name is dying out. About contemporary is the London amphora with twisted handles (Fig. [141]) with the Muses Melusa and Terpsichore and the bard Musaios. Orpheus among the Thracians and Terpsichore in a reverie with the harp are purely pictures of lyric feeling.
As if music had tamed them, the vase-pictures of the Periclean age change their nature. All crudities have gone: the too bold foreshortenings and the realistic details taken from great paintings are less obvious: nothing any longer disturbs the free play of the lines. The conception of men rises to its highest possible point. The figures on the Munich stamnos (Fig. [146]) are not merely masterpieces of fully developed drawing but also ideal types of pure free humanity. Movements are often merely motives of beauty: the fold style combines a new naturalism with the most monumental effect.
This new spirit also animates the finest of the white-ground lekythoi, whose proper history begins in the Glaukon period ([p. 134]) and cannot be traced far beyond the 5th century. In their first period they had preferred to render domestic scenes, representations from the female apartments. But the purpose of these grave vases continually asserts itself more and more. The ferryman of the dead appears, to take goodly men into his bark; the brothers Sleep and Death dispose of the corpse (Fig. [142]); Hermes, the conductor of souls, waits to be followed; the dead man laments for his life. But the domestic scenes have given place to the walk to the grave; and the visit to the tombstone, beside which the dead man stands or sits as if alive, becomes the typical subject of the lekythoi. The special technique of these vases produces an effect often very different from the red-figured style, especially since the white filling of the outlines ([p. 134]) is dropped. The employment of glaze-colour in the rendering of outlines, and the transition to brush-painting, with which from the first surfaces had been covered in different varieties of colour, lead afterwards to an unusual individualization of the line. One cannot say that this technique approximates the lekythoi to the effect of wall-painting as much as it severs it from red-figured vase-painting. Only a few exceptional late specimens in their pictures operating freely with light and shade burst the bounds of vase-decoration, and show clearly with what good sense the vase-painters renounced competition with the great art, which now victoriously solves the problems of full perspective, of giving the effect of depth in space, with the gradation of dimensions, and the contrasts of light and dark.
In a Boston lekythos (Figs. [143] and [144]) we have an ‘existence’ picture in the manner of the new period ([p. 136]). The dead warrior stands in Polygnotan attitude, with bent arm resting on his hip (cp. Fig. 135, last to left), beside his altar-shaped tomb, and looks over it to the girl, who without perceiving him approaches with funeral offerings. One notices in the treatment of the nude, that he is the product of an age which already had the perspective sense: so vividly do the few lines of his contour, his muscles, and his knee-pan, give the suggestion of a rounded body; and also the drawing of the female nude, which accident has freed from the drapery added in perishable dull paint, in its very realistic outline goes beyond anything previous. Since the Circe and Phineus kylikes, and the numerous black-figured and red-figured pictures of bathing, dancing, and drinking hetairai, art had busied itself with the naked bodies of women as much as of men: and where nudity could not be represented, it indicated the outlines of the body through
PLATE LXXXVII.