The “fine style,” the culmination of Greek art, was a development of that last described. The black ground, red figures, and white ornaments show the highest point to which previous styles gradually led upward. Drawing and composition are here at their best. The early stiffness has given place to a fuller grace, and there is a nobility in the figures and faces to which the earlier artists never attained. The limbs lose their unnatural distortion, the muscles are less rigid--there is, in one word, more life in the drawing. The accessories also gain by the greater freedom of treatment. The drapery hangs more gracefully, its straight-lined stiffness giving place to a more natural arrangement. In the later specimens of this style--so markedly different from the earlier ones that they have been classed together as the florid style--there is a more minute attention to finish, a greater elaboration of dresses and other accessories, and a decided tendency toward finding the ideal human form in that which is most graceful. Gold appears in the ornamentation (Fig. 188), and arabesques encircle the necks. Polychrome vases were made at the same time, some of them showing the utmost excellence of figure-drawing, and draperies of blue, green, or purple. When the art began to decline, taste and execution both deteriorated. The figures lose their graceful proportions, and acquire a heavier appearance. They are also more crowded, and the dresses become more garish, until at last all refinement, both of conception and treatment, was lost in coarseness and grotesque puerility. The amphora (Fig. 189) illustrates the decadence. [Illustration: Fig. 188.--Hydria. Black, with Gilt on Neck, and Red Rim with Black Studs. (Trumbull-Prime Coll., N. Y. Metropolitan Museum.)] [Illustration: Fig. 189.--Greek Amphora, with Columnar Handles. Red on Black. From Canosa. Height, 20 in. (Appleton Coll., Boston Museum of Fine Arts.)]