We take leave of the archaic styles with the charming picture of an anonymous painter, the ‘master of the bronze foundry,’ who on a Berlin kylix (Fig. 125) transplants us into the interior of the workshop of a sculptor in bronze. A workman is poking the oven, another is handling the bellows, the assistant looks on, the master is working at a statue, not yet fully put together: so intimate is the contact with life in this scene. Everything interested the vase-painters of this time equally; they have spread out before us human life, got their material from every quarter, and wherever they laid hold of it, it was interesting. How closely they came to grips with their subject, how they tried to be clear, and to give a lively picture of what they saw, and how under their hands the object at once changed into the artistic type, the human body into the clearly defined study of the nude, the garment into a thing of decorative life, and an assemblage of human beings into an ornamental figure composition! [Illustration: PLATE LXXV. Fig. 124. SCHOOL-SCENE: FROM A KYLIX BY DURIS. Fig. 125. BRONZE-FOUNDRY: FROM A KYLIX WITH THE “LOVE-NAME” OF DIOGENES.] [Illustration: PLATE LXXVI Fig. 126. CENTAUROMACY: FROM A RED-FIGURED KYLIX.] CHAPTER VI. THE STYLE OF POLYGNOTOS AND PHEIDIAS In the studio of Euphronios the so-called ‘Horse master’ painted a kylix now in Berlin with the praise of the fair Glaukon. The outside is decorated in the usual red-figured technique with lively scenes of riders and stables, the inside (a youth and a girl) is rendered in outline, with coloured interior lines and surfaces, on the ground covered with a white slip. The progress in the rendering of bodies and drapery is unmistakeable; the oblique view of the female breast is almost correctly caught, the material of the cloaks is packed in lost folds with bent-round end. But even the whole conception of the figures goes far beyond the archaic art of the pre-Persian time: the proportions and faces have a touch of greatness, beside which all preceding art seems narrow and embarrassed. The simplification of the profile and the severe long lower part of the face essentially determine one’s impression of the heads. A new period is announcing itself: a time of progressive naturalism and at the same time a period of noble greatness of style and exalted types. The statements of the ancients as to the great painting of this age, of Polygnotos and his company, lay stress on these qualities; not only the progress, which relieves the rendering of body and garment of the old stiffness, but the great Ethos of these paintings is praised. So with good reason we call the vase painting of the post-Persian generation Polygnotan, even if at the beginning of this epoch the influence of the great art is not felt so much as at its culmination.