Pottery and Porcelain, from early times down to the Philadelphia exhibition of 1876Elliott, Charles Wyllys
History
Pottery and Porcelain, from early times down to the Philadelphia exhibition of 1876
Elliott, Charles Wyllys
Pottery -- History; Pottery -- Marks
The _number_ of these vases, cups, etc., now existing in Europe is very
great--at least 20,000, and some experts make the number as high as
70,000. The best-known collections are--at Naples in the Museo
Borbonico, 2,000; in the Vatican at Rome, 1,000; at Florence, 700; at
Turin, 500; at Vienna, 300; at Berlin, 1,690; at Munich, 1,700; at
Dresden, 200; at Carlsruhe, 200; at Paris, the Louvre, 1,500;
Bibliothèque Nationale, 500; at London, British Museum, 2,600. There are
also a great many in private collections throughout the world.
What the keen and artistic mind wants to know is, not only what fine
work was done by the Greeks, but why they did it--what, indeed, made
that life more beautiful than any we find in all the earlier histories
of man.
Through the wrecks and convulsions of time this crowd of delicate,
perishable things still exists; what vast numbers must have been made
and destroyed in the varying populations of Greece, Rome, Tyre,
Carthage, and wherever Grecian civilizations and tastes made their way,
it is not easy for the mind to compass. And we must remember that these
things we now describe were not in every man's hand; they were in a good
degree for the rich and well-to-do. No slave (and slaves then abounded)
used a _kylix_ from which to drink his wine, nor an _oenochoe_ from which
to pour it.
That vases and cups were used and made especially as tokens of affection
to be placed in the tombs, we know; that they were fashioned and painted
for prizes at the Panathenaic games of Greece, we know; and that they
were used in many ways in the symposia and feasts, we also know; and the
numbers made must have been nigh countless. No satisfactory explanation
of this profusion has so far been hit upon.
The potteries, of course, must have been many; for Brongniart cites in
Greece proper twelve now known cities where vases were made; in Italy,
some fourteen; and we know, also, that they were made in most
[Illustration: FIG. 47.--_Cup of Arcesilaus, View of the Outside._]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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