middle helladic to the late helladic i shaft graves 23 страница

The main frieze shows Dionysos and Ariadne seated, while to either side around the vessel are ener­getically dancing maenads, a satyr, and a hunter. This Dionysiac scene is a common and appropriate choice for a mixing bowl for wine, but the composi­tion is unusual in representing Dionysos at a larger scale than Ariadne, about the difference between a heroic-scale figure and one who is life-size. Her clinging drapery reveals her voluptuous figure, and she pulls her veil forward to signify her status as bride and wife. More provocative is the way in which Dionysos’s right leg is draped over her left thigh, giving a decided sexual tone that is not typi­cal of this scene. Around them the cloaks of the maenads billow out while their chitons cling to their bodies or fall away. Certainly one could compare the style to the Nike acroterion from Epidauros (see Figure 11.2, page 271) and suggest that the vessel originated in Athens, but with such an expen­sive work, we have to consider the importance of the patrons in northern Greece, the Thessalian and Macedonian elite, in supplying commissions for such a work.

The krater’s subject matter and use in a cremation burial, and the presence of ritual and sympotic vessels in the tomb, are thought to be the result of the owners’ belief in the afterlife and the possibil­ity of a luxurious, heroic feast. An Orphic papyrus text found in Tomb A is also associated with mystery cults that looked to the afterlife and heroizing the dead. Certainly the lavish cost of the grave goods is in sharp contrast to the more modest tomb furnishings of fifth-century Athens, emphasizing the significance of the afterlife for the deceased and family and creating a heroic setting for the funerary rituals.

Another example of costly tomb furnishings is the regalia said to have come from a tomb in Taras/ Taranto (Figure 12.16). The restored necklace features female heads and seeds as pendants. The ring shows in low relief a seated female figure holding a scepter, who could be a priestess or a goddess. The very rare scepter is a significant indicator of status and authority. It has an intricate gold net sleeve that covered its original wooden core, now replaced by a resin rod. The top finial is a Corinthian capital that supports acanthus leaves enclosing a glass fruit, a lavish topping decoration like the acanthus on the Lysikrates Monument (see Figure 12.5). Based on the ring’s image, it is thought that the ensemble might have belonged to a priestess in Taras/Taranto, and surely to a member of the aristocratic elite.

This disposition of luxurious grave goods in the fourth century, from southern Italy to the Black Sea region, provides us with rare examples of metalwork from the classical period. It also shows that

the restraint practiced in burial customs in fifth-cen­tury Athens was no longer as pronounced and elite families would provide elaborate furnishings and tomb markers for the dead, for their care in the afterlife, for their commemoration in contemporary times, and for the enhancement of the family’s prestige.

pottery

Literary accounts suggest that the fourth century was a high point of achievement in wall and panel painting. The simulation of three-dimensional objects in a per- spectival space made some pictures appear to act as windows into the world. Feats of illusionistic painting mentioned in literary sources include a purported encounter through painting between Zeuxis and his rival Parrhasios:

[Parrhasios] is reputed to have entered into a contest with Zeuxis, and when the latter depicted some grapes with such success that birds flew up to the scene, he [Parrhasios] then depicted a linen curtain with such veri­similitude that Zeuxis, puffed up with pride by the verdict of the birds, eventually requested that the curtain be removed and his picture shown; and, when he under­stood his error, he conceded defeat with sincere modesty, because he himselfhad only deceived birds, but Parrhasios had deceived him, an artist. (Pliny, N.H. 35.65; tr. Pollitt 1990, 150)

However exaggerated the account may be, it demon­strates that there was an expectation that a two-dimen­sional painting could create the illusion of three-dimensional mass and space and might even fool a viewer with its veracity at just a quick glance. In other sources we can read about the expressiveness and emotions of individual figures in paintings, and we can catch glimpses of such work in some surviving tomb paintings that we will discuss at the end of the chapter.

Painted pottery continues as a medium in the fourth century, but its production in both quality and quantity begins to decline significantly in Athens during this century. There are several impor­tant regional schools of vase painting that develop in southern Italy and Sicily, including Apulian, Lucanian, Campanian, and Paestan, but by the end of the fourth century, figural painting essentially disappears as decoration for pottery.

Ceramics remained an important industry in fourth-century Athens, but there was less red-figure work and no white-ground painting during the fourth century. Some potters began to shift produc­tion to terracotta figures, such as those from the girl’s tomb in the Kerameikos discussed above (see Figure 1.5, page 10). Black-glaze ware was produced in large quantities, as well as gold-decorated variations, and in the third century glazed pottery with overpainted ornament called West Slope ware began to be produced (see pages 277-278 and Figure 11.9, page 278). The demand for red- figure Attic pottery in Italy was far less than it had been in the fifth century, and much of the figural painting exported there became more schematic and hurried in its quality. Attic painters did produce more carefully painted vases for the market in the north Black Sea area, and the fourth-century Kerch style is named for one of the sites in that region.

12.18 Apulian red-figure calyx krater fragment attributed to the Black Fury Painter, c. 400-380 все. 7% in (19.7 cm). New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art 20.195. Priam at ransom of Hektor. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.

is looking behind and past Athena toward Aphrodite, who covers her mouth and looks as if she were conspiring with Paris, as indeed she was as she offered him the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen, and consequently started the Trojan War. Interestingly, Aphrodite is painted in sim­ple red-figure technique with just a bit of gold leaf for her wreath, unlike the other figures who have even more gilding and added colors on the red clay. She almost blends into the background while being the key protagonist in the story.

The demand for painted pottery in southern Italy and Sicily was now met primarily by regional workshops that had begun to appear in the late fifth century. At first these workshops produced pot­tery that was closely related in style and subject matter to contemporary Attic vase painting, but by the fourth century more distinctive regional styles and interests had developed to meet local needs and tastes. Apulian pottery, produced for the southeast region of the “heel” of Italy, was the most prolific of the regional schools. An early example of Apulian red-figure work is the fragment of a krater by the Black Fury Painter showing Priam in the tent of Achilles, attempting to ransom the body of his dead son Hektor (Figure 12.18). Priam wears a Phrygian cap and highly embroidered clothing befitting an eastern monarch in the Greek imagination, but he kneels looking downward, presumably before Achilles, while Hermes stands protectively behind him. The painter uses more added white, yellow, and red than was typical in Attic red-figure work in the early fourth century, and this is char­acteristic of Apulian work, as is the depiction of architectural features such as the column just behind Priam. The detail and precision of the work easily match anything produced in Athens, and the ren­dering of the three-quarter face is effective both as a three-dimensional drawing and in conveying the mood of Priam. Indeed, his pose resembles that of Penelope waiting for Odysseus (see Figure 5.19, page 118) and captures the feelings of the king and father who has lost the greatest defender of Troy.

Much Apulian pottery has been found in tombs throughout the region, and many of the largest and most elaborate shapes, like the loutrophoros in Figure 12.19, were made as grave goods. There has been debate about where in Apulia such pottery was produced, with some favoring the single large Greek colony of the region, Taranto (ancient Taras) since it had connections with Athens during

the fifth century. Since many of the vases are found further north and in tombs of indigenous, non-Greek people, there is a question now as to whether the pot­tery might not have been produced in the central or northern areas of Apulia, closer to where many of the largest and most fragile vases were used. Given that these tombs are primarily for non-Greek Apulians, it is possible that the potters and painters might have been non-Greeks as well but had learned the techniques and repertory from earlier Greek artists. In any case, there is strong interest in Hellenic culture in Apulian pot­tery, but its forms, styles, and subject matter are adapted to local interests (see Carpenter 2009).

The loutrophoros by the Metope Painter shows a typical scene of late Apulian pottery, with a funerary shrine called a naiskos in the center and women in the

landscape around it. The naiskos encloses two figures, a mistress and her slave/servant, who assists her in dress­ing. A lavish metal loutrophoros, a duplicate of the actual vase, is rendered with yellow and white paint to give it a three-dimensional appearance with reflected light. The use of several shades of white, yellow, and brown on the drapery gives it a tangible, naturalistic quality. The painter has also used a simplified version of linear per­spective to show the recession of the ceiling to create depth in the naiskos. Around the naiskos are women and a couple of men in a rocky landscape, with white dots rather than lines to indicate the ground; the man at the lower right brings an offering of a mirror and wreath to the tomb. These figures are mostly in red-figure, contrasting with the color and brightness of the central naiskos figures; they are also smaller in size than the woman in the naiskos, making her monumental in scale like a statue, similar to the funerary stele of Mnesistrate mentioned earlier (see Figure 13.2, page 322). The depiction of a large landscape has the consequence of diminishing the scale of the human figure, which is a striking departure from the dominance of the human figure in Attic pottery painting.

Apulian potters also developed a black-glaze ware that was overpainted, with the colored pig­ments placed on the glazed surface and leaving no bare clay. Called Gnathian ware after a site in southern Apulia, the best examples are more like free painting than red-figure and are lustrous in their appearance (Figure 12.20). The squat lekythos from a tomb in Taras/Taranto shows the motif of a woman’s face looking out of a window. The painting has a sketchy quality to it that could be described as more painterly than linear red-figure painting. From the literary accounts there was a debate over the better of these two main approaches to painting: whether one should draw figures precisely with line and then fill with color, or whether one should rely on brush strokes of paint set against each other to create a more impressionistic rendering of an object or figure. The wood of the window frame uses variation in line and tone that is less precise as an architectural rendering, but approximates the appearance of wood better than linear drawing. This technique of overpainting may have influenced the development of later Athenian West Slope ware in the third century.

Other centers of painted pottery include Sicily, Lucania (on the instep of the Italian peninsula), Campania (the area around modern Paestum), and Poseidonia/Paestum itself. Lucanian pottery began to be produced in the late fifth century. Like Apulian painting, it showed a great interest in scenes related to tragic and comic performances (see Figure 9.11, page 224). Many fifth-century plays were revived in

performances throughout Italy, and some actors became famous for their work in this repertory. Much of Lucanian painting, like the pelike with Elektra and Orestes at the tomb of their father Agamemnon, is predominantly red- figure in technique. The figures are shown at different levels to indicate a landscape setting, and the three-quar­ter views of the faces provide a sense of emotion and gaze among the characters, as if they were acting on a stage. The Choephoroi Painter did five versions of this scene, which is the opening of the tragedy Libation Bearers by Aeschylus. It is not an illustration of the play or necessar­ily of its performance, but it does capture the essence of the scene in showing Elektra despondent when attend­ing the tomb of her father, unaware that her brother has returned secretly to avenge their father’s murder.

Campanian pottery is primarily red-figure with much added white and yellow, and shows a number of idyllic or Dionysiac scenes (see Figure 13.14, page 335). This school of painting was developed by painters emigrating from Sicily, making the connection to Attic red-figure painting indirect. The town of Poseidonia/Paestum became an important center for painted pottery in the later fourth century, and the work of one painter, Asteas, is especially noteworthy (Figure 12.21). The small Paestan-ware krater shows a phlyax play, with an old miser who has been sleeping on his chest of valuables in the center. Two robbers have broken into the house and are pulling him off the chest, while a slave looks on helplessly to the right. Here Asteas has shown a comedy being performed; the figures all wear the masks and padded costumes of comedy and the actors are set on a stage that is elevated and supported by a row of columns below. While they appear distorted, the figures are well drawn and capture the stilted but animated quality of comic acting.

The phlyax scenes and actors should be seen as reflecting the interests of Greek culture in south­ern Italy and an example of the responsiveness of artists to the interests of their local communities. By the fourth century, Poseidonia/Paestum was under the control of Lucanians and the city had a significant Italic as well as Greek population. The elaborate Apulian kraters and amphorae have been found primarily in tombs and were made as grave goods, but interestingly, most of these tombs are in the areas of Apulia outside of Taras/Taranto where there were no Greek colonies and their owners were not Greek. These factors point to the increasingly complex relationship between Greeks and non-Greeks throughout the Mediterranean and the growing importance of new patron­

age outside of the traditional centers for Greek art.

mosaic and fresco

We have paid little attention to the floors of Greek buildings up to now, but with the development of a new medium, mosaic, as a floor in the fourth century, we need to look at what images were literally under foot. The earliest mosaic appears at the end of the fifth century in Corinth and consisted of small pebbles set into mortar to create a durable and permanent flooring. The use of the medium spread in the fourth century and can be found at Sikyon, Eretria, and Olynthos. With the use of small pebbles rather than paving stones, mosaicists could divide a floor into panels and create a wide range of decorative borders and panels, as can be seen in the mosaic from the andron in House A vi 3 in Olynthos (Figure 12.22). The central part of the floor is a medallion framed by a vine band and cor­ners; these are framed by panels of meanders and waves. The klinai along the walls of the andron

The mosaicists had a limited palette of dark and light pebbles, supplemented with reddish stone in some examples. The medium was essentially two-tone, so that there is not as much sense of three- dimensionality as we see in contemporary vase painting. The medium works well for the decorative borders and geometric patterns, but is initially less successful with figural compositions. In order to draw lines to define the human form, the mosaicist had to use a line of dark pebbles, which did not allow for much subtlety or detail when working in the relatively small surface area available in the andron. We need to consider, however, that the mosaic floor would have been a very significant and expensive undertaking for the owner of the house. Few houses had mosaic floors, and their polished and durable appearance would have been impressive. It is also worth remembering that being placed in the andron, they would be on display to guests for extended periods of time, creating a distinctive experience for the symposiasts. Since the exterior of houses was relatively unadorned, walking into and on a decorated mosaic floor would signal the status or aspirations of the house’s owner. In time, as we shall see in the Alexander Mosaic from Pompeii, the pictorial quality of the medium could rival fresco painting (see Figure 14.2, page 346).

As mentioned earlier, the fourth century was regarded in antiquity as the great age of wall and panel painting, with Zeuxis, Parrhasios, and Apelles among the most illustrious names in the literary record. None of the works mentioned in the sources survived, but in 1977 several tombs buried under a great tumulus at Vergina in Macedonia were excavated by Manolis Andronikos, providing a glimpse of what we have lost in this medium. The largest tomb, Tomb II, is a barrel-vaulted structure with two chambers and a Doric facade (Figure 12.23). The tomb contained the cremated remains of a man and woman, each set in a gold box inside a stone sarcophagus, along with other offerings of ivory, wood, gold, and rare luxury textiles (see Figure 5.18, page 117). There has been much dispute about the identity of the deceased, with Andronikos proposing that it is the tomb of king Philip II (assassinated in 336) and his second wife Cleopatra, but alternatives have been proposed, such as Philip III Arrhidaios (murdered in 317) and his wife Eurydike. The evidence is not conclusive, although alternative theories to Philip II have been recently rejected on the basis of forensic examination of the skeletal remains. Certainly these are royal Macedonian burials and a date for the tomb in the last third of the fourth century is likely.

The attic story above the entablature was painted in fresco (Figure 12.24). Although much of the surface has been lost, the fact that the facade was buried in the tumulus has preserved enough to study the composition and style of the painting. The scene is an animal hunt, with hunters on horseback and foot killing deer, a boar, and a lion from left to right. In the center is a youth wearing a rose costume on a rearing horse; he aims a spear and moves toward our right. On the right, two youths on foot and a bearded rider attack a lion. The figures are about half of the height of the frieze and move through a detailed wooded landscape with rocks, puddles, trees, and mountains in the background. The use of light and dark creates the illusion of three-dimensional bodies moving through the landscape. Unlike vase painting, most of these figures move diagonally within the picture space, and the youthful rider to the left is shown in three-quarter view from behind, moving into the picture depth. We have here a fully realized world in which three-dimensional figures move in all directions through a space that extends into our own, in other words, a window onto another world. While this is how we look at images, con­ditioned by Renaissance perspective and our experience of photography and film, it is not the conven­tion by which earlier ancient viewers looked at images. Before this, the figures and their action dominated the picture; they acted on a shallow stage that did not appear as an extension of the viewer’s world. The developments in perspective and modeling from the mid-fifth century onward gradually transformed this convention and we can see its result in the hunt fresco.

The figure on the central rearing horse resembles in pose Alexander from the second-century mosaic in Pompeii and on the Alexander Sarcophagus that we will discuss in Chapter 14 (see Figure 14.1, page 344; Figure 14.2, page 346). Were this the tomb of Philip II, as seems possible, it would make sense, particularly if Alexander were overseeing the creation of the tomb after his father’s assassination, to show the son and heir in the center, perhaps making the bearded rider attacking the lion to the right Philip himself. While illusionistic in style, a hunt with so many victims in such close proximity can only be a staged type of event or constructed image, essentially a pano­ramic type of narrative where different hunts have been set into the same landscape, which here takes a far more prominent pictorial role than in earlier narratives. The fresco was intended to show Macedonian royalty engaged in a regal activity, making them the equals of the great kings of Persia and elsewhere, and legitimizing the passing of the crown. Whereas images of the hunt were collective activities of members of the polis in earlier imagery, such as the Chigi olpe, hunting imagery is now a royal prerogative and symptomatic of the changes taking place in the fourth-century culture.

The smaller Tomb of Persephone (Tomb I) at Vergina is named for the painting on its interior showing Persephone’s abduction by Hades (Figure 12.25A). The tomb had been robbed, with only bones and some fragments of pottery and marble left behind. The bones included those of a woman, a man, and an infant, making it a family burial like Tomb II and Derveni Tomb B. One short end wall shows Demeter seated (Figure 12.25B); to her left is a badly preserved scene that recent study suggests is Persephone and Aphrodite with Adonis (D’Angelo 2012), while to her right is her daughter Persephone being abducted by Hades in a chariot.

The abduction of Persephone shows a companion crouched on the right, holding up her hand against the terrifying sight of Hades in his chariot. He holds the reins of the horses with one hand while holding Persephone in the other. Persephone reaches out both arms; with the foreshortened angle they appear to be reaching out toward her mother on the adjacent wall. This painting is surely an example of the painterly style of the fourth century, with large brushstrokes that sketch the strong movement of bodies and drapery. The contrast between dark and light tones gives the bodies solidity, but there is a very strong emphasis upon facial expression and gesture that captures the distress of the women and the aggression of Hades. The chariot is set at a three-quarter angle to the picture plane, and it appears as if it is headed out of the picture into the space of the tomb and down to the underworld. This and the three-quarter views of faces and bodies give a full three-dimensionality to the picture.

We do not know the names of the painters at Vergina, but given that they were working for power­ful royal patrons, it is probable that they were highly skilled and conversant with the current trends in painting mentioned in the literary sources. Indeed, Apelles, who is sometimes named as the greatest of all painters, worked for Alexander the Great and had a monopoly on his painted portraits according

references

Barr-Sharrar, B. 2008. The Derveni Krater: Masterpiece of Classical Greek Metalwork. Princeton: American School of Classical Studies at Athens.

Carpenter, T. 2009. “Prolegomenon to the Study of Apulian Red-Figure Pottery.” American Journal of Archaeology 113, 27-38.

D’Angelo, T 2012. “Adonis in Vergina: The Frescoes of Tomb I Reconsidered.” 113th AIA and APA Annual Joint Meeting, January 5-8 2012, Philadelphia, PA.

Hurwit, J. M. 2007. “The Problem with Dexileos.” American Journal of Archaeology 111, 35-60.

Jenkins, I. 2006. Greek Architecture and Its Sculpture in the British Museum. London: British Museum Press.

Morrow, K. D. 1985. Greek Footwear and the Dating of Sculpture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Pollitt, J. J. 1972. Art and Experience in Classical Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pollitt, J. J. 1990. The Art of Ancient Greece: Sources and Documents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.