Greek vase-painting (Griechische Vasenmalerei)Buschor, Ernst
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Greek vase-painting (Griechische Vasenmalerei)
Buschor, Ernst
Vase-painting, Greek
nature become richer, corporeal, living, spiritual. Animal
representation begins also in the same formulistic manner. The choice is
in contrast with the Minoan animal world: there is complete absence of
the Oriental animal world of fancy; we only see the Northern fauna;
horses, roes, goats, storks, geese. The animals stand upright, graze, or
rest with neck turned round. The technique is always that of the pure
silhouette; only the birds often, as in the pre-Mycenean and late
Mycenean styles (Figs. 4 and 15), show hatched or cross-hatched inner
drawing of the body.
These geometric ornaments and abstract silhouettes of men and animals
form the complete stock out of which the artist of the period provides
for the decoration of his vases. With them he fills the bands into which
he loves to divide the vase (Fig. 18); or at all events the shoulder or
handle band, constructively the most important, in which case he covers
the lower part of the vase with black (Fig. 19) or with parallel rings
(Fig. 23). The bands, the breadth of which is varied, are filled in two
ways. Either we have continuous ornaments, and processions of animals,
chorus dancers, warriors, chariots and horses, which in this style are
essentially nothing but ornament; or he divides the bands, and
particularly the handle bands (Fig. 19) vertically into rectangular
fields, metopes as they are called. The metope naturally takes a
different scheme of filling the space from the band; if the latter
prefers a continuous series, the former requires ornaments complete in
themselves, like circles and rosettes, or in the case of figures, the
antithetical group, the heraldic opposition of two different fields of
figures, or of two figures in the same field. The figures connected by
compulsion of space are then more closely united by a central motive,
and there arise ornamental compositions not at all drawn from actual
life, _e.g._ two birds both holding in their beaks a fish or a snake,
two horses with crossed fore-legs, rearing towards each other, tied to
a tripod, or held by a man with a bridle, two roes with raised fore-legs
leaning against a tree. Band and metope with their compulsory schematism
no longer suffice for the growing need of representation: in the large
vases the chief band is often made very high, or in the upper part of
the vase a rectangle adorned with ornament or figures is left out from
the surrounding black: thus arises the vase with special field for
subjects.
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