Of course this is all devoid of meaning; for in spite of all progress and freer treatment the style is merely concerned with the decoration of a surface; ‘exigencies of space’ are its supreme law. These control the type of the human figure, for even where it is not essentially an ornamental scheme, like the runner with bent knee, it fills from top to bottom the stripe assigned to it, extends its breast frontally, and reaches out its arms, as if it were yearning for a frame. And as the body avoids all perspective, so the head in profile shows its most expressive part, the eye surmounted by the brow, in full extent, and renders the long hair falling down over the neck as smooth surface, and the curly forehead hair as spiral. There is no rendering of folds to show depth in the drapery, which now the artist in true Greek fashion treats in an abstract way, unlike reality. The human figure remains a type, a homogeneous constituent part of the stripes, which are entirely designed for filling space. It matters little, if between chariot-race and lion-hunt on the Chigi jug (Fig. 37) a double Sphinx is inserted as central motive, or Bellerophon lays the Chimaera low in presence of two Sphinxes (Fig. 34); if close to the lion-hunt in the same stripe, Hermes leads the three goddesses before the fair Trojan shepherd, and if the names of the personages are entered in the field with big letters as a kind of ornamentation by way of filling: the incipient delight in telling a story is taken at once into the service of filling the field. As the human figure still appears almost completely on a par with the ornamental animal figure, so there is little trace of any superior weight being attached to the scenic representations in the decorative system. Where the [Illustration: PLATE XIX. Fig. 38. PROTOCORINTHIAN OR CORINTHIAN JUG. Fig. 39. Fig. 40. CORINTHIAN ALABASTRON AND ARYBALLOS.] painter employs them, it is true he puts at their disposal the chief frieze and often one at the base in addition, but he frames them with prominent stripes of ornament or animals, and side by side with the narrative vases purely decorative ones are still produced. The presence of several animal friezes on a single vase (_e.g._ on jugs of the shape of Fig. 35) is not uncommon; like band ornamentation in general, it is in contrast with the practice of the Geometric period (p. 25) and is probably to be traced to a strong influence of Oriental textile art. For the most severely shaped black vases, which are nearest to the bronze models that we possess (Fig. 38), do not always adopt this fundamentally non-tectonic breaking up of the body of the vase.