Introduction
to Greek Pottery and Vases
When it comes to Greek pottery
and vases, there is no disputing about tastes. The Greek was no
less a man of taste than the American, though he
preferred to drink wine at feasts from the pottery of a black earthen kylix decorated in red, or a red cup with paintings in
black. He had glass, and plenty of thin and beautiful
glass, in cups and goblets of varied form. He had wine
equal to the best of the Cote d'Or or the Rhine banks.
At his feasts poets, soldiers, statesmen gathered;
jewels adorned their arms and fingers, rich garments
made the assemblies gorgeous, flowers filled the balls
with perfume; statues of snowy marble, the works of
artists whose fame is enduring, paintings by Zeuxis and
Apelles, looked down on the scene. All that the most
refined civilization could invent surrounded him. We are
but poor and far-off imitators of the luxury and
splendor of that civilization, and we have small claim
to set up standards of beauty by which to measure it.
One of the most important lessons of art, to be learned
from this fact in Greek ceramic history, is that all
standards of beauty in color as in everything else are
arbitrary. The time may and probably will come in the
future when another civilization will look with wonder
at our standards in music, painting, clothing, color, at
our tastes in many arts, and regard them as more
inexplicable than we now regard the Greek taste in using
black and red for the colors of gayety and splendor.
The rapid advance of Greek literature and art--due,
perhaps, as much to the possession of a free and
flexible language as to the superiority of Greek
intellectual power--naturally resulted in a pride which
is abundantly exemplified among modern nations. In
nothing is this pride more frequently illustrated than
in the claim of inventions in the arts. No great
invention in modern times has escaped the conflicting
claims of various nations. So the Greeks, when they
possessed literature and arts, began to claim the
invention of both. When they had established the
personality of their ancient authors, various autonomous
cities disputed among themselves the honor of having
given them birth. When they began to believe in their
own claims to original inventions, different tribes
asserted priority of right to the discoveries. In a
later period, when Greece had formed relations with, and
knowledge of, other nations, intelligent men of course
understood the character of the claims made by their
ancestors. But modern students have not always
recognized the origin of these claims, and hence a
frequent assignment to the Greeks of the invention of
arts which they only learned at a late period from
others, and consequent error in giving to Greek art a
greater age than can, with evidence, be affirmed of it.
Thus the Greeks claimed the invention of letters,
although other parts of the world had libraries and
abundant literature centuries before the Greeks
possessed an alphabet. They claimed the invention of
finger-rings, although finger-rings had been the
ornaments of Assyrian and Asiatic fingers perhaps from
the days of Tubal-Cain, before the Deluge, and abounded
in Phenicia and in Egypt, in gold and in pottery, from
the earliest times. Samos claimed for Greek artists in
bronze, about 650 B.C., the invention of images in
pottery. But Corinth dispute the claim, relating the
story that the Corinthian potter Dibutades had a
daughter who sketched her lover's profile from its
shadow on the wall, and the father conceived the idea of
filling it up with clay and so making the first pottery
portrait. But long before Dibutades was born or Corinth
had become the local refuge of a roving band of Greeks,
Phenicia had been making great and small images of
pottery; and for a thousand years Egypt had produced
figures of gods, men, and animals, in unglazed pottery,
or adorned with exquisite enamel.
top Introduction
|
First
Painted Vases |
History
Of Greek Art |
Kinds
of Vases |
Greek
Burial Pottery
Current Most Popular LoveToKnow Article:
History of
Clocks & Watches |
