Greek vase-painting (Griechische Vasenmalerei)Buschor, Ernst
History
Greek vase-painting (Griechische Vasenmalerei)
Buschor, Ernst
Vase-painting, Greek
Quite in contrast to the early Attic kylikes of the Klitias period and
to the Spartan, which often take no regard to the space in the
representation, the figure always adapts itself to the circular form,
extends its masses to fit the space, often presses head and feet against
the edge, and gives the interior a decorative and very animated
appearance, to some extent comparable to a rotating wheel. One imagines
the painters had studied and sketched the bending, crouching, running,
twisting, and turning of handsome youths often only to get motives for
their interior scenes. Skythes, the master of fine black-figured votive
tablets on the Acropolis, who liked to dedicate his kylikes to his young
colleague the painter Epilykos, in the interior of the kylix at Rome
(Fig. 110) goes beyond this stage, and fills the space more loosely with
the lyre held at right angles and the freely arranged knotted stick of
his singing boy; and Epiktetos, who painted his wonderfully subtle
figures in a long working life for various potters, Nikosthenes,
Hischylos, Pamphaios, Python and Pistoxenos, in the late Python kylix in
London (Fig. 111), under the influence of later masters, goes over to
the two figure picture. One can see from their bodies that they are
prior to the time of Euphronios and Euthymides. In his
[Illustration: PLATE LXV.
Fig. 112. HETAIRAI: FROM A PSYKTER BY EUPHRONIOS.
_From Furtwängler-Reichhold, Griechische Vasenmalerei._]
[Illustration: PLATE LXVI.
Fig. 113. HERAKLES AND ANTAIOS: FROM A KALYX-KRATER BY EUPHRONIOS.
_From Furtwängler-Reichhold, Griechische Vasenmalerei._]
vigorous lyre-player, whom we may identify with his favourite Epilykos,
Skythes does almost too much in the rendering of the chest-muscles and
makes the abdominal muscles seen in front view, and rendered in thinned
varnish, press against them in an impossible way; Epiktetos, who is for
a while disinclined for interior drawing, turns the breasts of his
dancing women outwards, and in their space-filling movement reminds of
old types. But the master of a Munich eye kylix has side-views of
shields, and draws a kneeling leg in back view, so that the sole is
visible and the calf almost disappears. Back views of the human body are
given also in kylikes from the workshop of Kachrylion, which takes us
over into the Leagros period just like the works of Phintias and Oltos,
whom we already know. For Phintias soon outdoes the theft of the tripod
of his early Deiniades kylix on a fine amphora at Corneto, and Oltos,
the painter of the Pamphaios amphora and most of the Memnon kylikes,
passes from the praise of Memnon to that of Leagros on the fine kylikes
from Euxitheos’ workshop.
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