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The Origins of ancient greek pottery and art work
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.