partly develop noticeably baroque and locally limited peculiarities, which in their chiefly sepulchral representations, influenced by Orphic-Dionysiac cults, often fall into coarseness, stiffness, or effeminate insipidity, let us take only one example. The Boston volute krater, 1¼ metres high (Fig. [158]) belongs to a group of Apulian grand vases, which elongate the shape of the Talos vase (Fig. [153]) and add rich ornament in white colour. On the reverse bearers of offerings above one another in the favourite borrowed motives (sitting, standing, running, leaning on a pillar, drawing up one foot) surround a white-painted Heröon with the dead man: the obverse combines a similar building with a mythological scene, the slaying of Thersites by Achilles, and thus gives a mythical prototype to the dead man, for whose grave the vase is designed. The liberal use of white paint, the ‘black ground’ ornamentation of the neck and foot with branches and tendrils are progressive elements, which lead the way for Hellenistic products like the Apulian Gnathia vases; in the increased pathos of the faces is traced, though provincially coarsened, the stronger weight given to sentiment in the 4th century; and the perspective rendering of the building operating with light and shade, which often extends to the ornament, points to a period, which had won complete freedom in space, and certainly could distribute figures over the landscape more naturally than the vase-painter, who filled the tall space with them only in a superficially decorative way.
Sentiment and light, the great achievements of 4th century art, were the ruin of the decorative silhouette style, whose figure world can admit of pathos, as little as the bursting of its vase sides by perspective views corresponds to its surface decoration. Even in Athens, where out of the successors of the Meidias, Pronomos and Talos styles an after-bloom developed (Figs. [155] and [159]), which from the rich exports in the Black Sea is usually called the Kerch style, the new tendencies of art were fatal to the red-figured style. To be sure this was in a different direction to Lower Italy. The figure world of the elegant Attic vases, which in the new naturalness of motives and drapery, in the strong emphasis on female forms, is far removed from the types of Pheidias, betrays little of the enhanced pathos of the great painting, which one would have to deduce from the sculpture of Skopas and Praxiteles, even if it were not expressly witnessed to by literary tradition. From the same finer decorative sense the Attic masters made no use of the full perspective of their time, and interrupted the vase-surface neither by buildings or ornaments drawn in perspective nor by composition in several planes, but following the old manner simply arranged above and beside each other on the surface their generally large and restful figures. As in the post-Pheidian style they like to pick out single figures by white colour, and do not despise gilded additions, nay, they even often heighten the decorative effect of colour by the application of light blue, green and rose, occasionally also by figures in relief and painted (as Xenophantos did in his aryballos with hunting Persians, meant for Eastern customers, in signing which he emphasizes his Athenian citizenship). The varying shades of the colour scale give one an inkling of the new problems of light, which were certainly struggling for expression not only in sculpture; in the drawing of the figures, rendered in strong relief strokes, nothing of this is observed. Thus the ‘Kerch’ masters ensure to their vases a finer general aspect than the Southern Italians, just as their commonest figures are distinguished from the Italian by a certain nobility; but they are far behind the huge advances of the great art, which now in its methods of expression attained the heights perhaps of Titian and Tintoretto, and have an arrieré effect, listless and
PLATE XCVI.
[Fig. 159]. LATE ATTIC KALYX-KRATER.
[Fig. 160]. HELLENISTIC CUP.
dull. Just as the new style could express itself better by the applied than by the reserved ornamentation, which in spite of new formations has a stiff and lifeless effect, so too the red-figured style, which as is proved by finds at Alexandria, continued to exist down into the early Hellenistic age, was no longer the congenial vehicle of the expression of its age; and it was only seldom that notable personalities attempted to practise it.