PLATE XCIII.
[Fig. 154]. SATYR AND SLEEPING MAENAD: FROM A RED-FIGURED JUG.
[Fig. 155]. WOMEN AT THE BATH: FROM A LATE ATTIC PELIKE.
From Furtwängler-Reichhold, Griechische Vasenmalerei.
CHAPTER VII.
LATE OFFSHOOTS
WE should unnaturally shift the centre of gravity in our narrative if we treated the late period of Greek vase-painting with anything like the same fulness as its development from the Geometric to Meidias. The fully developed and often almost playfully treated vase-shapes give no longer any really tectonic ground for the silhouette style, which had exhausted the qualities compatible with its inward nature: the elegance of the vases feels the pictorial decoration to be a burden, as does the style of the figures feel the tectonic compulsion. Even in the last third of the 5th century examples are multiplied of the transition to free brush technique. The Pelops amphora (Fig. [148]) adorns its black neck with a sphinx added in white, the Talos vase (Fig. [153]) and with it a multitude of other vases seek to fix the impression by a white central figure, to which the others rendered in ordinary technique are only a pale foil. In the course of the 4th century this foil too, was dropped, and black glazed vases of elegant shape were decorated only with figures or ornaments loosely added in white. The brush technique, both the black of Boeotian vases ([p. 110]) and the white of Attic and Lower Italian, made a new development in ornamentation, which culminates in spiral tendrils and branches with depth of space, in combination of figures and foliage of plastic effect. Besides these freely decorated vases the red-figured long continue. But the centre of gravity of the manufacture lies no longer in Athens. Even in the time of Pheidias the Attic school sent a branch to Lower Italy, which took root in the Periclean colonies of Lucania, extended to various places in Lucania, Campania, Apulia, and Southern Etruria, and soon grew up as a strong plant. In this production, which in the 4th century completely supplanted Attic importation, few really original artists took part, who all seem to belong to the early period, and perhaps were emigrated Athenians; the master of the Paris ‘Tiresias’ krater is one of them. From the early group, in which good Attic tradition is strongly felt, we select two bell-kraters. The full, and rather empty heads, the very general conception of the divine types leave us no doubt as to the Italian origin of the Paris ‘Orestes’ vase found in Lucania (Fig. [156]), while the wonderful group of the sleeping Erinyes, Klytemnestra urging them to vengeance, and the purified Orestes, show us not only a fine model but a clever hand. From the drawing and shape of the vase it may very well belong to the end of the 5th century, like the closely analogous London krater (Fig. [157]). This vase with much humour introduces to us one of the favourite Italian farces (the Phlyakes) and begins a long series of similar representations from different workshops. Thus e.g. the painter Assteas painted two Phlyax vases, one of which in comic parody gives the violation by Aias of Kassandra, while the other is a serious theatrical scene, which with its detailed rendering of the stage clearly demonstrates the influence of the drama on vase-painting.
The activity of this painter, who from the stiff variety of the style and the localities of the finds must be localized in South Campania, belongs to a later phase, which does not concern us. For the more these Italo-Greek vases in shape, decoration and representation develop local peculiarities and depart from their purely Attic starting point, the less do they belong to our survey, which excludes provincial varieties. Out of the mass of Lower Italian vases of the 4th century, which in shape partly run parallel with the Attic,