Figs. 143 & 144. YOUTH AND MAIDEN ON A WHITE-GROUND LEKYTHOS.
[Fig. 145]. WOMAN SEATED AT A GRAVESTONE: FROM A WHITE-GROUND LEKYTHOS.
the cover of the drapery ([p. 119]). For Polygnotos we have the express tradition of women with transparent garments, and on the Argonaut krater even Athena’s grand forms are indicated; the great liberator of wall-painting must also have been a pioneer in the drawing of the female body. The new style here too brings perfection and fills the form of women with its noble greatness and simplicity. That it too, in contrast with the 4th century, eschews all that is typically feminine, soft and unformed, is a proof how strong was the ideal of male beauty.
A London lekythos (Fig. [142]) also represents a dead soldier at the grave. The winged brothers Sleep and Death with tender hand dispose of his corpse, as they do with the dead Sarpedon in the Iliad: and the lekythos-painter took his type also from the Sarpedon pictures; the young warrior who had fallen far from his country, should on the vase have the same boon of burial in his native soil, as was granted by Zeus to the Lycian king. The fine type was then divested of its proper meaning and received a more general signification. The London vase, which uses lustreless colours for the outlines of its figures also, must be somewhat later than the Boston vase, although the new technique, that is pure brush technique, went on for a time beside the old. Though stylistic estimates now become difficult, one fancies in the wonderful vigour of the drawing, and in the stronger individuality of the hair, that one is nearer to the period of the Parthenon pediments than in the somewhat more austere Boston group. Where the way led may be shown by the woman sitting on the steps of a tomb on a lekythos in Athens (Fig. [ 145]), which not only by the strongly plastic suggestion of the outline goes beyond the Pheidian period proper, but also in the grandiose heightening of the simple motive shows itself as one of the works which take up and cast in new moulds the pathos of the Parthenon pediments. Every line in the very individual drawing of the woman, who is supporting her left hand and lifting her garment with her right, while her feet are unruly in submitting to the sitting posture, is animated by passionate unrest.
Though the age of Pheidias liked pictures of feeling with quiet figures like the music-scenes, the Munich stamnos and the lekythoi, it did not exhaust itself in them. Beside the vases with large figures, there are others, which continue to cultivate the elegant style and prepare the way for a class which flourishes in the last decades of the century. Little jugs with nursery scenes, pomade boxes with pictures of female life, globular unguent pots with lekythos-like mouth are the principal vehicles of this style, and the “Eretria” master is a typical representative. On great and small vases we find scenes of animated motion, passionate scenes of conflict, which on their side too, share in the nobility of the style of the age. The brutal vigour and hardness of old motives seems broken, softened, often almost takes a turn to elegance. The order of the large compositions with its arrangement of the figures over one another and indication of the broken ground by lines closely follows the Polygnotan system. But while the Polygnotan depth in space was produced by a naturalistic tendency, which soon led to complete freedom in the great art, it is continued by the vase-painters as a mere principle of distribution and space-filling, i.e., it receives a decorative character.
One of the finest pictures of movement from this period decorates a stamnos at Naples (Fig. [147]): women who are sacrificing before a tree-trunk dressed out as Dionysos and dancing to the tambourine. The exact dating of this picture, like the whole chronology of the late and post-Pheidian vases, is a matter of dispute: but this much is certain, that it cannot be understood except as a near echo of the art of
