The amphorae are rather earlier than the Phineus vase, and often very like the decorative earlier Chalkidian specimens. Chalkis seems to have supplied to them the western technique, the vase-shape, the foot-ring, and also to have supplied the patterns in many specimens for animal and rider decoration. But the less severe construction of the vases, the irregular division of the fields for figures, the preference for a dark covering of the ground above the rays, the liberties in decoration, lead us to more Eastern soil. The very chain of buds, luxuriant and hardly stylized, which often covers the neck, shows the unpedantic and concrete Ionic style, and the same playful carelessness appears, when the painter is lavish with filling rosettes and buds, when he inserts into a heraldic frieze of animals a complex of creatures furiously biting each other, or puts [Illustration: PLATE XXXVII. Fig. 72. IONIC EYE KYLIX. Fig. 73. HEAD OF ATHENA, BETWEEN THE EYES OF AN IONIC KYLIX.] between his favourite squatting sphinxes a fighting warrior, a couple of dancers, or two running girls, when he composes heraldically the heads of two processions of riders, and makes a combatant the central motive of heraldic riders, when he invents animal combinations with a common head. So it is no wonder if he makes into an effective motive of decoration the apotropaic eyes popular in this phase of art, which we know from Delian, Melian, and Rhodian vases of the 7th century (Fig. 57), if he often adds ears and nose, and fills the centre with an arbitrarily chosen motive, a leaf or a human figure. The eyes are found on the necks of amphorae, but very often as outside decoration of the kylix, which in perfected specimens shows alike the height and the end of this manufacture.