Like the pinax of Timonidas many other votive tablets of the same find take one out of the stock vase scenes, especially in the delight in landscape, the trees conceived of in their special natures, the cross-section like genre scenes from the workshop of the potter and metal-worker, from mining and sea voyages. The vases, however, show little of those progresses in colouring and spacing, which we must assume in greater measure for the great art of painting. The decisive step in the history of vase painting, which is especially embodied for us by the painter Timonidas, consists in the liberation of the field, in the transition from the ornamental to the pictorial style, in the abandonment of filling ornamentation, which only survives in vegetable [Illustration: PLATE XXII. Fig. 45. HUNTER AND HOUND. PINAX FROM CORINTH, SIGNED BY TIMONIDAS. Fig. 46. FRIEZE OF AN EARLY PHALERON JUG.] motives suitable to the occasion and scattered birds, serpents, lizards (Figs. 34 and 66), and in the triumph of figure-subjects over friezes of ornament or animals, which can best be followed in the kraters (Fig. 65). With this step, which is completed in the beginning of the 6th century, we are brought close to the black-figured style proper, which is differentiated by some technical innovations. But before we pass to that, we have still to follow the transition here described through the other fabrics of the 7th century. We can rapidly pass over Sparta, which as yet produces no ware fit for exportation. The course here is similar to what went on in the Argolid. Beside many specialities one seems to notice kinship with Ionian pottery in the small bands of squares accompanied by dots and the branches on the edge of the kylix, in the placing of similar animals in rows. In what close relation earlier Spartan civilization stood to Ionia, we learn from the history of lyric poetry.