The advance in the preparation of the clay and glaze colour came about on the Greek mainland. Tradition makes the Sicyonian Butades invent the red colouring of the clay at Corinth, and thus gives the correct indication. The Chalcidian and Attic workshops helped the new technique to prevail; in the East it gradually gets the upper hand and forces the Ionian manufactories to give up their favourite white ground and adapt their technical freedom to the growing strictness of the western system. Attica, which in the 6th century opens a dangerous rivalry in Eastern and Western markets and finally wins the day, brings the process to perfection. With the refinement of incised technique it puts an end to the parti-coloured method still much affected by Corinthians and Chalkidians, it clears away the big surfaces coloured red and white and all colour in ornament and animal frieze, and helps the harmony of clay and black to its purest and fullest effect. With the disappearance of the old parti-coloured system the vases are completely removed from the effect of free painting. For that we may be grateful to fortune. For this refinement of the black-figured style permitted the sensitive feeling of Greek artists for decoration to satisfy the delight of narrating and describing along with the ornamental traditions of the old style. They had no need, as had the old Minoan vase-painters (p. 10), to shrink from borrowing figured scenes. The recasting of types into the decorative silhouette style made it possible for them to conjure on to the vases whatever touched their hearts and delighted their eyes, and thus to transmit to us an infinite variety of scenes, without which our knowledge of Greek legend, Greek life and Greek art would have remained terribly scanty. Corinth must lead off the history of this new style. The chief centre of commerce and industry in the Peloponnese, the celebrated seat of a flourishing ceramic industry and of an important school of painting, it not only took the decisive step to the new technique, but even in its red-clay phase had helped the designs to drive out animal decoration, and composed, or at least introduced into vase-painting, numerous types, which supply material to other workshops for a long time. The quadriga in front view, which Chalcidian and Attic painters repeated so often and which kept [Illustration: PLATE XXXII. Fig. 64. HERAKLES AND EURYTIOS; HORSEMEN: FROM A CORINTHIAN KRATER. Fig. 65. CORINTHIAN KRATER.]