But their most important use, and that to which their preservation is mainly due, was in connexion with funeral ceremonies. They were not only employed at the burial, but were placed both outside the tombs to receive offerings, and inside them either to hold the ashes of the dead or as “tomb-furniture,” in accordance with Greek religious beliefs in regard to the future life. Several classes of vases are marked out by their subjects as exclusively devoted to this purpose, such as the large jars found in the Dipylon cemetery at Athens, which were placed outside the tombs, the white Athenian lekythoi of the 5th and 4th centuries b.c., and the large krateres and other vases of the 4th century b.c. found in the tombs of Apulia and other parts of southern Italy. Their use as cinerary urns was perhaps more restricted, at all events as regards the painted vases, though the custom is well known and is referred to in literature from Homer downwards. In “Mycenaean” times coffers (λάρνακες) of clay were used for this purpose, especially in Crete, where fine painted examples have been found; but of Greek pottery of the best periods there are but isolated instances.
The diagrams in fig. 15 show the principal shapes characteristic of Greek pottery in all but the earliest periods, when the variety of form was as yet too great to permit of more than the vaguest nomenclature; each form has its conventional name appended. These shapes may be classified under the following heads: (1) Vases in which food or liquids were preserved; (2) vases in which liquids were mixed or food cooked; (3) those by means of which liquids were poured out or food distributed; (4) drinking-cups; (5) other vases for the use of the table or toilet. Thus we have the pithos and amphora for storing wine, the krater for mixing it, the psykter for cooling it, the kyathos for ladling it out, and the oinochoe or prochoos for pouring it out; the hydria was used for fetching water from the well. The names and forms of drinking-cups are innumerable, the principal being the kylix, kotyle, kantharos, rhyton (drinking-horn) and phiale (libation bowl). The pyxis was used by women at their toilet, and the lekythos, alabastron and askos for oil and unguents.
Technical Processes.—Though the Greeks succeeded in making pottery of a very high order from the point of view of form and decoration, the technical processes remained throughout of the most elementary—for glaze was not used at all, the colour was of the simplest, and the temperature at which the ware was fired was not high enough to introduce any serious difficulties. As we should expect, it is possible to trace a gradual improvement in the technical processes in the direction of greater precision and refinement, for no vase-painter of the best period could have achieved his decorative triumphs on wares so coarse in substance and so rough in finish as those that satisfied his predecessors. As in every other case technical and artistic refinement went hand in hand. In the earliest times the clay was used with very little preparation; at all events before the introduction of the potter’s wheel the finish is not to be compared with that of the early races in Egypt. As the practice developed no doubt, specially good clays were found in certain districts, and these became centres of manufacture or the clays were carried to other established centres. The primitive wares usually exhibit the natural buff, yellow, grey or brownish colours of other elementary pottery, and the surface is somewhat rough and possesses no gloss. Thenceforward it becomes appreciably warmer in tone as it becomes finer in texture, until it reaches its perfection in the glowing orange, inclining to red, of the best Attic vases of the 5th century b.c. In the vases of the later Italian centres the colour again reverts to a paler hue.
The clay for the potter was doubtless prepared by a system of sedimentation, so as to get rid of all coarse particles. It was mixed with water and decanted into a series of vats so that ultimately fine clay of two or three grades was obtained. Both red and whitish clays were used, and the best potters gradually discovered that mixtures of different clays gave the best results. The clay for the Athenian vases was obtained from Cape Kolias in Attica; and as it did not burn to a very warm tone, ruddle or red ochre (rubrica) was added to it to produce the lovely deep orange glow that distinguishes the best vases. Corinth, Cnidus, Samos and other places were also famous for their clays, and at the first named tablets have been found bearing representations of the digging of clay for pottery.
| Fig. 15.—Shapes of Greek Vases. |
The improved manipulation of the clays, and the increasing knowledge that the colour of a clay could be modified by admixture of other substances such as ruddle and ochre, really paved the way for what is known as the glaze of the Greek painted vases. This delicate gloss, so thin as to defy analysis, has been commonly called glaze, but it cannot be a glaze in the sense of a separate coating of finely-ground glass superimposed upon the clay. In all probability, as the Greek potter used finer and finer clays and so was enabled to perfect his shapes, he found that after a vase had been “thrown” he could get a closer texture on it by dipping it in a slip of still finer clay material and then smoothing it down and polishing it on the wheel when sufficiently dry. But the mixtures he would use for such a purpose—of very siliceous clay and ochre—would, when they were burnt in the Greek kiln, not only fire to a beautifully bright colour, but also to a glossy surface, especially where the flames had freely played about them; and it is more in accordance with our knowledge to believe that the exquisitely thin gloss of the finest Greek red vases was produced in this way, for it seems impossible that it can have been a coating of any special glaze.
In any case we may state broadly that the body of Greek vases is always fine in grain, fired hard enough to give forth a dull metallic sound when it is struck, but seldom fired above a temperature of about 900° C., which a modern potter would consider very low. When broken the inside is generally found to be duller in colour, and is often yellow or grey, even where the external surface is red. The material is exceedingly porous, and allows water to ooze through it (another proof that it was not glazed). Numerous analyses of the material of Greek vases have been published, but they tell us nothing of the secrets of the Greek potter. The results of a great number of these analyses may be summed up as follows: silica, 52-60 parts; alumina, 13-19 parts; lime, 5-10 parts; magnesia, 1-3 parts; oxide of iron, 12-19 parts. Analyses of a thousand ordinary simple red burning clays would give a similar result. It is to the glory of the Greek potter that with such ordinary materials, by the exercise of selection, patience and skill, he achieved the fine artistic results we see. He did as much as can be done with natural clay materials, but the glory of painted colour and glaze, like the later Persian or Chinese, was not for him.
Manufacture of Vases.—The earliest Greek pottery is, like all primitive pottery, hand-made. The introduction of the potter’s wheel into Greece was the subject of various ancient traditions, but we now know that it can be easily traced by a study of the primitive pottery of Crete, Cyprus or Troy. In Cyprus, for instance, the Bronze age tombs of 2500-1500 b.c. contain only hand-made pottery, but in the next period (1500-1000 b.c.) we find hand-made and coarse vases side by side with a more developed kind of painted pottery—the “Mycenaean”—obviously made on the wheel. It seems probable, therefore, that the wheel was introduced into Greece about 1500 b.c.; it was certainly known to Homer, as a familiar allusion shows (Il. xviii. 600). It was still a low circular table turned with the hand, not the foot; representations of its use are seen on several vases of the archaic period (fig. 16), and they further prove that the vase was replaced on the wheel for the subsequent processes of painting, polishing and adding separately modelled parts, as well as for the original shaping or “throwing.”
| Fig. 16.—Votive tablet from Corinth; a potter applying painted bands while the vessel revolves on the wheel. |
The method of shaping the vase on the wheel, which is the same as that still in use, need not be described in detail; the feet, necks, mouths and handles were modelled separately or shaped in moulds, and attached while the clay was moist, as is also indicated on a vase. Large and coarse vases, such as wine casks (πίθοι), were always modelled by hand on a kind of hooped mould (κάνναβος).