Macron helping us to see the Pillar Idol

How odd that Ernest Gombrich in Art and Illusion should feel that this is still "conceptual" art!  Op. cit., Part II, Ch. IV, p. 131.  He is discussing the Judgment of Paris cup in Berlin, and he is puzzled by the "almost pictographic clarity of form that Greek art inherited from Egypt".  I was shocked a half century ago by the paragraph from which this comes, though generally I am very comfortable in being brought to see as Gombrich did.

For reference, from a later reduced photocopy of the excellent 19th-century drawings for the Wiener Vorlegeblätter, here are both sides of Berlin cat. no. F2290. The Munich collection is more often reproduced, but for this cup (which Jane Harrison, who seldom remarked on the beauty of her visual documents, thought perhaps the loveliest of Greek vases), if you have Pfuhl's Malerei und Zeichnung der Griechen, or any of a number of other books, side B with only dancing maenads is illustrated there.  Frickenhaus did illustrate both sides

From my old teaching files (scanned from a slide taken from an unnamed source).  Side A of the cup Furtwängler cat. no. 2290.  The other side, with only dancing maenads, is reproduced in many books.

(1) First, what the drawings of the pillar idol represents: what sort of support, what sort of mask, what sort of garments.  Macron, uniquely, shows it almost obliquely, i.e., in 3/4 view, except for the profile mask, itself exceptional.  Though we have several Dionysos masks, life-size or larger, of stone or terracotta, it is not certain that any of them MUST have been used for a pillar idol; of course, they would have been colored, with dark hair and eyes and a red mouth.  Either the mask was formed with the beginnings of shoulders and chest, or a cross-bar or broadening of the main support has to have held the garments, which consist of a full linen chiton, the standard undergarment for both sexes, and a glorious himation, with border patterns and leaping dolphins either woven in or embroidered on the wool (paint is not to be excluded, but such a rich garment will have been expected to last for many a year).  I imagine that the ivy crown on Dionysos's head is living ivy, but it could have been gilded metal, of course.  Stuck in behind the shoulders are other branches, plainly from living plants, on which pierced bread is supported.  I do not think this bread is so flat as pita or a tortilla, but I can't help thinking of the Easter braided loaves, of leavened egg dough and with red-dyed eggs embedded, or the unbaked as well as unleavened disc of soul food brought to the cemetery on All Souls' Day (the latter, of course, made of whole grain soaked in honey, would break under their own weight, if used in the manner seen here; I only meant that in current practice analogous special loaves are prepared).  I don't know what the bread means, but it is shown frontally, i.e., full circle, on either side of the frontal mask on a number of the "Lenäeenvasen".  The old, old drawings of Macron's kylix are not prevented by curvature of the profile of the kylix from showing the straight, utterly unatomical, wooden post both under the lower edge of the chiton and above the head, and, the more important in a draftsman like Macron, there is no hint of real shoulders (let alone arms) or real bodily mass inside the garments: only the mask is really anthropoid.  Iconographically, Macron's pillar idol is canonical (though this kylix does not show the table with stamnoi on it that the pictures on actual stamnoi show), but to me, after a lifetime with Greek vases, it fairly proclaims that he is showing the sort of thing that a particular group of women would themselves have rigged up, particularly in the bread stuck through by the branches.  So how like a herm?  The herm exhibits at least one body part, the genitals, and it has something like stubs where arms belong,  and it is not clothed, especially not richly and heavily clothed (though, much, much later one thinks of the herm in winter shivering in no more than a chlamys on coins of Bithynian Nikomedia):

27 07 07  Æ18  3.79g  axis about 6h.  Bithynia, Nikomedia.  Antoninus Pius.  Herm, humanized and protected from cold(?) given the upper body of Hermes and wrapped in his chlamys.  This comes with three reverse dies, RG 66, 67, and 68.  This is the plain one, 66 (MÊTROPOLE | NEIKKO{MÊDEI); 67 has the kerykeion propped against the herm, and 68 has the prow of a ship.  A charming conceit that I'd like to know more about.

(2) Now we can move on to the second question, that of conceptual representation, taking care to distinguish 'conceptual' from 'conventional'.  In rendering the parallel folds of the pillar idol's himation and in rendering the naturally crinkled thin linen of the women's chitons, almost like a seersucker, Macron relied on conventions gradually introduced and perfected in the generations of Exekias and of the red-figure Pioneers (of the last quarter of the 6th century BCE), though he took them to the breaking point, much more so than other vase-painters of the 480s.  Also, whenever possible, he draws the legs fully inside the drapery, and in the maenad at right in the cropped detail photograph it is downright necessary, since she is running to the left and turning in her torso to turn her head facing to our right, and the action of her legs, obviously based on observations from life, is new (I think, unexampled), and could not be guessed by the viewer from the contours of the blousy chiton alone.  I mention this first, because it makes the contrast to the straight falls of inert cloth on the pillar idol all the more striking.  That choice was neither conventional nor conceptual; he was showing us (and abandoning the purely frontal view, which is a cheap way of showing how wooden this temporary icon was) some women's  own festival Dionysos figure.  In the 19th-century line drawing we cannot see where he used diluted glaze-paint where the linen chiton ballooned so much that in outdoor sunlight it would become almost transparent.  Not fully convincing, you say?  Macron (and, may I say, the Brygos Painter, too, in his own way) would risk showing what he observed alive, what interested him visually, in any way that he could.  We must not for a moment forget the medium and the curved surface he was using and that every step that the best vase-painters of this generation took was unprecedented.  Yes, of course, there are sone stress folds in the statues of the dynasty of Akkad, really arresting intellectual innovations on the sculptor's part, on the nearly life-size headless statue from Susa of the king Manishtusu in the Louvre, and in Dynasty XVIII Theban tomb paintings there are some breathtaking experiments in representing what one sees.  But these breakthroughs are heartbreaking, too, since in both places they yield to conventional rendering, in Neo-Sumerian Mesopotamia and in the Ramessid dynasties in Egypt, and none of these earlier experiments, of course, was accessible to Greek artists.  It was as if they had never been.  But just in the generation of Macron and the Brygos Painter, not forgetting that there was painting on perishable wood panels that we can never recover (and we must not presume that Etruscan work, let alone tombs, can stand in for Greek easel painting, nor indeed any tomb paintings or votive panels), but fully evidenced on the best vases some of whose painters may not have been confined to the potters' quarters, we are entering the age of just the kind of art that concerned Gombrich (and in his own, quite different, way Deonna, who called it le miracle grec): it is what we call Western Art, though it has always had to struggle.  It is more than simple eidetic rendering of what you see.  It is the artistic side of the science of optics.  It is art grounded in the empirical, but art that realized, as if in the intelligence of its midwives (so to speak), that to look natural and 'real' to everyman it had to be visual experience mastered by the artists and reconstituted in intelligible forms.  Phidian drapery and anatomy in the Parthenon pediments (I don't know whom H. W. Janson was remembering when he called it the expression of the pure poetry of Being, but it pretty surely was German).  It is NOT naturalistic.  A wordsmith like Buffon, asserting that Style is the Man Himself, and insisting that of course he didn't mean the visual arts that are purely imitations of what one sees, unwittingly confessed to being style-blind!  But he was right about Style.  Our experience of seeing and moving in space, like our experience of seeing others, both to create portraits and to make crowd scenes and landscapes, or to show the loveliness of drapery responding to the body that wears it, all these things need to be understood visually and made (literally) memorable and meaningful, that is to be expressive of our own minds as artists and so far as possible accessible to other human minds, is obviously related to the way that our visual minds, by the work of our brains, create memories both true to experience, in one sane sense or another, that are coherent (that cohere in those little grey cells of ours), satisfying and helpful to our mental life in enabling us to tie together the everyday and the seemingly transcendent.  What about photography?  It was when it realized its own possibilities that it became able to do what the other visual arts do, not before (except here and there among the geniuses of 19th-century photography).  Unless it does that, it is just illustrations for some catalogue.
This is not the place to discuss Egon Schiele's women, which I've known for nearly a half century.  I want to keep this as short as I can, but Macron is remarkable, too, in his rendering of women.  Not only do half of them (and sometimes on other vases, too) show the whole body in the drapery.  That body is feminine in structure and contour at a date when others just put female breasts on a boy's body (not having equal access to naked girls); Macron likes the female body.  At a date when they had just learned not to make breasts like halves of lemons, Macron in the flute player at left in our detail shows the slack shape of moist chiton cloth and through the opening shows the beginning of the side of the breast.  That may be unique.  Macron does not have the Brygos Painter's grasp of structure, but his interest in the sensuous properties of the life that he observes is very rare.  I mean, there are huge personal differences among the masters of any period, in any medium; think how different Berg and Webern were.  By the way, that altar (again, not strong in its structure) is notable for showing its miniature painted pediment.  Also, I'd better add that thyrsoi are hollow fennel stalks with dried leaves attached to the top.  Euripides describes their rattling.
Monday, 16 April.  Have untangled one of the longest sentences (they permit writing a Post rather than a book-chapter).  I mentioned in the preceding having acquired Kandel's Age of Insight.  I still have about 150 pages of Kandel to read so cannot be sure that knowing from scans what really goes on in the brain contributes to understanding how memory and creativity work, but I am relying on what I learned from Antonio Damasio in rereading some chapters of Gombrich's Art & Illusion, in the latest of the revised editions.  Gombrich was deeply interested in personal and traditional Style.  If, when I have finished Age of Insight, I have discovered that Kandel has new knowledge, or not, of the biolognical relationship of memory and style, I'll write a Teegee Essay on that; Opera Nobilia is for the artists, and the 19th century was right in valuing the best painted vases as ranking with work that later centuries did on paper or canvas.

Eroticism on "the Grecian Vases from Stamnos"

Yes, the Stamnos is interesting!
The title of this Post is from p. 95 of The Age of Insight: the Quest to understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present, by Eric R. Kandel.  NY, Random House, 2012.
 
When atomic scientists are lecturing on the results of their work at the Gizeh pyramids, or when neuroscientists are writing about ancient art, the humanities types should pay close attention.  At the end of this little essay, I'll say why.

Very early stamnos.  Oltos. BM E437 from Cervetri.  ARV2, p.54, 5.  Signed by Pamphaios as potter.  The Painter is Oltos, and the subject is Herakles wrestling Acheloos.  The stamnos is a vessel that can be covered but not sealed.  Its horizontal handles are for lifting it, and its broad foot is for stability.  In other words, it is a type of krater (assuming that you mixed some water with the wine, if, that is, you take the name very strictly), rather than an amphora.  We aren't sure that the ancients would have used the word stamnos for it.

First let me say something about Stamnos, though it is not that I know of any new inscriptional evidence as to whether specialists in Greek vase-painting have been using the word as the ancient Greeks used it.

Chicago, Art Institute.  Stamnos, mid-5th century BCE, namepiece of the Chicago Painter, a follower of the Villa Giulia Painter.  The ivy wreaths, the stamnos represented on one, the kantharos, Dionysos's cup, all place this among August Frickenhaus's Lenäenvasen, where it is pl. 4.  But this photo was made for the big exhibit of Greek Vase-Painting in Midwestern Collections (text by Warren Moon and Louise Berge), 1979.

Concentrated in the Early Classical and Classical periods, a number of red-figure stamnoi are decorated with depictions of a women's wine festival, quite consistently though some more exhaustively than others.

Snapshot from pl. 103 of Masterpieces of Greek Drawing and Painting, in its turn from De Witte and then Frickenhaus, Lenaeenvasen, Berlin, 1912, no. 13: ARV2, p. 1019, no. 82, where its new location and number, Warsaw 142465 (ex Czartoryski 42) are given.  The vase itself is a stamnos and, as usual, in the ritual represented, a stamnos is represented used in it.  The Phiale Painter is the youngest fine pupil of the Achilles Painter.  Whether the festival shown is the Lenaea or one of the parts of the Anthesteria it involves opening and ladling out of stamnoi, and whether by its ivy leaves or the baby Dionysos (here tended by women representing nynphs) or by the pillar image of Dionysos, it is a women's festival concerned with wine, and the thin (so probably wooden) column, as well as the literary sources, point to a country site.

All show the stamnos vase-shape on a stamnos-shape vase (this unrolled drawing is from a stamnos).  Where a woman holds a baby, it is universally agreed, she is being a nymph holding the infant Dionysos.

Snapshot of the Naples Stamnos no. 2419 of the Dinos Painter, a pupil of the Kleophon Painter, from Arias & Hirmer pl. 206.  This shows all the details that occur repeatedly on Frickenhaus's Lenaeenvasen.  It has been reproduced repeatedly; down to 1962 alone, see ARV2, pp. 1151-2, no. 2.  You have the pillar image, with its ivy and bread. the stamnoi on a table with the ladles used for dipping out the wine into skyphoi (not kylixes, which are for indoor banquets), the thyrsoi, the tympana. the maenads (women cutting loose--and notice that while one of the Late Archaic vases is usually taken to illustrate this festival, it is this one that is as near as makes no difference to Euripides' Bacchae).  This is a festival that could get sticky and smelly with all that new wine, but despite the déshabille, there are hundreds of Greek vase-paintings better qualified to represent 'eroticism'

A collection of these vase-paintings was studied by August Frickenhaus in 1912, in one of the Berlin Winckelmannsprogramme volumes.  I once did a report on these, but I don't have the volume available here.  The four I do show will suffice.  Beazley follows Frickenhaus in calling the festival the Lenäea (because it seems to be cognate with lenos, a wine vat), but others have thought it is the opening of the new wine in the Fall and part of the Anthesteria.  Either choice will do for what I need to say here.

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Of course, I am always shocked to see a scientist make a booboo as bad as any art historian or classicist could make about science.  It was drilled into my head when I was young (and at Berkeley, just downhill from the Rad Lab--but, no, I am not related to Ernest Lawrence), that scientists would regard us art historians as bubble heads if we were not reasonably empirical and conscientiously exact.  They always were confusing us with museum docents!  But Gombrich seemed unaware that we had considered the importance of conceptual and visual / optical / illusionistic art, intellectually considered, long before his admirable book appeared (and drew the lines somewhat differently: he needn't agree, but I'd been taught not to overlook the bibliography that did not so much appeal to me); he didn't even know that the Apollo of Piombino, for example, was not Archaic but Archaizing.  And, though E. R. Curtius did know Greek and knew it very thoroughly, of course, his translator, Willard Trask, did not always distinguish nu and upsilon or sigma and omicron, or, if he did, had not bothered to check the English edition before it went through several editions.

This is the sort of thing that we humble humanists do notice.  I am always afraid to say anything about physics or mathematics, lest I insult scientific thought or make an ass of myself--or, worse, post something that the young may blithely copy and paste till kingdom come!

I hope Professor Kandel will not misunderstand my noticing the eroticism of "the Grecian vases from Stamnos".  I suspect the German preposition auf might help to explain it.  But, good lord, what are editors paid for?  For another thing, in this day and age, and in his context, 'Grecian' for 'Greek' looks pretty silly.

Red-Figure Kraters in the Age of Perikles

 The Spina Kraters (finally posted February 17th)

The political career of Perikles (b. 495 BCE) began in 461, but in the history of Greek art we mean the 430s, especially art that looks Parthenonian.  Yet the best place to see vases that look Periklean is in the Ferrara Museum, where the vases from the two great cemeteries of Spina, Etruscan burials far from the Etruscan heartland in Tuscany and even farther from Athens, where the vases were made; it is essential to remember how many of the great vases were made for export to the West.  Max Hirmer's photos of the Spina vases are under copyright, so I have put them in an album, accessible only from this link, for study only, as educational materials.  My color slides can support the points I want to make, but you need the Hirmer photos, too, since mine are with available light (in a palazzo), through glass, and pre-digital.  The notes in the captions are those once provided for my students.

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Ferrara, from Spina, Valle Trebba, grave 617.  Calyx Krater by the Peleus Painter (Matheson, PE 1; Boardman 142--only a detail).  A, the Marriage of Peleus and Thetis, attended by the gods (all named in inscriptions); B, ordinary departure of warrior scene.  ca. 430, or a little later.  Compare the shapes of the calyx kraters of Euphronios and of the Niobid Painter; in each generation, the shape becomes a little slenderer

In linked album, see images nos. 34-46 and, for the beautiful fragments, nos. 17-21

Even more than in Archaic and Early Classical vase-painting, the art history of the large vases is different from that of small vase-shapes, such as those for personal use.  They are mostly kraters (that is, punch bowls, for mixing wine (too sweet, like Communion wine, and too strong for civilized drinking) and water; the very word, krater, means a mixing vessel.  Many of the finest ones belong to Beazley's Group of Polygnotos, who had come out of the mid-century Niobid Painter (nos. 7-8 in the linked album).  His younger companions, pre-eminently the Peleus Painter, named for this wonderful Marriage of Peleus and Thetis, do not stem directly from the Niobid Painter as Polygnotos had done, but, of course, some of their work and his are contemporary.  And, in any case, complex works must always be dated, relatively, according to their latest traits.  The Valle Trebba Peleus krater presupposes the completion of the cella frieze of the Parthenon.  Of course, the figures of Apollo and of Hekate (labeled) behind the horses look conservative compared with the group of Thetis, crowned by Eros, standing in the quadriga, and Peleus, crowned by Aphrodite at right, mounting the quadriga.  As a student, I worried over the difference.  Perhaps, however, by just this time, Delphic Apollo was losing his familiar character, with his mantic aspect consulted by heads of state, with his person so phoibos, glorious, even unapproachable, so much the exemplar of self-knowledge and moderation.  And here he is in the citharoedus type, besides.  Farnell surely was right to emphasize the popular, even rustic, character of Hermes.  Besides, in composing this scene, the Peleus Painter may have had in mind for Apollo and Hekate images of his boyhood that he particularly liked.  The active drapery, the turning movements, and the plumper faces of the group at right not only presuppose the most venturesome groups in the Parthenon frieze but we must remember how much we have lost, especially major painting for which Polygnotos of Thasos (an adoptive Athenian) was so famous.  If several vase-painters signed with his name, it may be simply that he was the artist of the age, its Raphael, say.  As indicative of the rapid and profound changes in Greek art (which is to say, in what became Western art) between, approximately, the 560s and the 430s, compare that earlier Marriage of Peleus and Thetis by Kleitias on the François Vase.  Do, please, click on the links, to study the fine detail photos needed for appreciation. 
Noting the beautiful drawing (in the relief line of vase-painting for the contours), see the Peleus Painter's fragments of a volute krater.  The use of diluted glaze-paint to shade the inside of the ear shows the influence of full-color panel painting, encaustic on gessoed wood and water-base paint on walls, of his time.

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Ferrara, from Spina, Valle Pega, grave 57.  Volute krater, decorated in two registers, by the Kleophon Painter (pupil of the Peleus Painter) in the late period of the Group of Polygnotos.  This vase is Matheson Kl 1 and Boardman 171.  On the front (A), a procession honoring Apollo; on the back (B) the Return of Hephaistos (see also his pelike in Munich for this subject).  All his work show the same graceful fluency in the lines.   Here you see Apollo in his shrine flanked by tripods and the omphalos at the left; he holds laurel rather than a scepter and his archer's quiver hangs above.  The young sacrificial bulls have curly pates and sweet bovine expressions.

In the linked album, see nos. 10-16

Several scholars have observed that the Kleophon Painter (for some of his other work, see Boardman's Attic Red-Figure: the Classical Period) is above all else working in the mood and manner of the Parthenon frieze.  His style is fluent, skillful, lovely.  His figures are always in proportion.  He draws as well as the Peleus Painter, and Beazley in particular was partial to his work.  The young sacrificial bulls  epitomize the Kleophon Painter.  He always reminds me of the Agorakritan stele of a youth holding one pet bird in his left hand and raising a cage (which held another/) in his right, well above the cat  sitting on top of a stele.  Against the stele leans a small boy (and we have no way of knowing whether he is a little brother, a servant, or the son of the deceased; unless old enough to wear a full beard and have a walking staff to lean on, the deceased is usually shown as ideally young.  The child is mourning over incomprehensible death (Greek religion, of course, did not deal in rewards and punishments, and its idea of death became medieval limbo, but loss is loss).  Some art historians have thought that, after the Parthenon was dedicated, a sculptor like Agorakritos might have been available, to those who could afford him and appreciate his work,  to make very fine grave stelai, this one in particular.  The Kleophon Painter was finely attuned to this style.

The Athens NM stele of a youth mourned by a boy evidently protecting his pet bird(s)--one in hand and another perhaps in the cage that he hold out of reach of the cat sitting on the stele.  Because the style is so evocative of the east frieze of the Parthenon, it has been thought that, once the great job was done, Agorakritos, the pupil of Pheidias usually identified in the style of the east frieze, may have been available for such an exceptionally fine stele as this one, which in any case has a relative dating in the decade after the friezes.  Cats are rare in Greek art.  Also, it is worthwhile to remind ourselves that we don't know whether the child is his servant, a young brother, or even his son, since ideal youthfulness of the deceased is maintained until he is fully bearded, middle-aged.

The religious scene on this krater is also extremely interesting.  In a shrine that looks like earlier Doric, and perhaps even of wood rather than stone, the statue of Apollo is seated, relaxed, in 3/4 view, much as the Achilles Painter's deceased woman is (linked album, image no. 1), his elbow leaning on the back of his throne.  Instead of a scepter, he holds a long staff that sprouts laurel leaves and wears a laurel crown.  As an archer, he has his quiver hung  in front of him.  The Delphi omphalos is in front of him, behind his staff, and behind that is a great tripod.  There is another tripod at right, and we notice that its Doric capital is decorated with hanging leaves (perhaps leaf and dart is intended, and we remember the decorated capitals of the Old Hera Temple ("Basilica") at Paestum.  But a column is implied; this second tripod stands on a column.  If this is Delphi, and we have seen the remains there of the Temple of Apollo, we realize that it is one of fair Greece's saddest relics.  Delphi was a very rich place.  The priest, laurel crowned, guides the sacrifice; beside his acolyte we have an excellent representation of a standing incense burner.  The young woman may be a kanephoros (canephorus), the basket bearer (though the later figures called canephori carry something different-shaped); it is one of those fancy traditional utensils that indeed are called baskets (kanoûn, plural kanna) for carrying grain or other food offerings in a religious ceremony.  All my life I have wondered which came first: the religious or the theatrical use of elaborately patterned, woven or embroidered, or both, overgarments, like that worn by this maiden with loose hair.  This shrine would not be the principal one at Delphi, so, I suppose, the Delphic cult carried out somewhere else.

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Ferrara, from Spina, Valle Trebba, grave 128.  Volute krater, Group of Polygnotos (without attribution to one hand or another).  Cult scene of chthonic and orgiastic character--with no labels!  Whether the deities are Sabazios and Kybele (Boardman), or Dionysos-Hades and Artemis-Hekate (Arias), or some aspect of Hades and Persephone is much debated, but the orgiastic and initiatory character of the worship is evident.  Arias' attribution to Polygnotos himself has never been accepted, and now this great vase is attributed to the Curti Painter, in the Group of Polygnotos

In the linked album, nos. 22-29

The volute krater shape becomes increasingly top-heavy, with curiously offset handles.  The figures, for which see the individual photos in the linked album, show that the ceremony is orgiastic and the figures of the seated pair of deities in a shrine (surely wooden here, given its proportions) have attributes that are plainly chthonic (earthly with roots in the underworld) rather than heavenly or Olympian.  The bearded god does not have a cuddly expression and a snake is entwined in his headband.  The goddess has a living lion on her left shoulder, supported on her hand.  Both deities hold scepters; these are rulers of their realms.  Athens had lots of cults of every kind (though these need not be Athenian or even Attic), but not on the Acropolis and often not even within the city walls.

In recent decades we have become used to people saying, "Now we are freer and more expressive; now we can give rein to our most primitive feelings."  The novelist Rose Macaulay in a novel covering four generations of a family (the BBC and PBS should get hold of this one), "Told by an Idiot" (1924, nearly a century ago) gently teased the younger generation for their assumptions about the repression of their grandparents in contrast to the license they enjoyed.  It still is fun to read, but I mention it here because I have read so many hundreds of essays and term papers in which students blithely date things according to the degree of license they exhibit, not only in subject matter but in the action they try to represent.  Now, the Curti Painter, as he is called, on the back of this vase (nos. 25-29 in the Album), freely bends and distorts to give a most believable picture of orgiastically enthusiastic dancing.  'Enthusiastic' means that the gods in question are really into them, or they are into the gods, as some of us have seen at revival meetings, for example.  But I doubt that this krater is very much later than the otther two we have just considered, and it is the shape of the top of the vase more than the dancing figures that makes me lower it a bit relatively.  The drapery sways wildly but the lines to render it do not look so late as, say the Dinos Painter (Boardman, Classical, fig. 177).

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Ferrara, from Spina.  Not illustrated in Arias and Hirmer.  It is an excellent example of the use (not new at this date, of course) of elements like relief ribbing borrowed from metalwork.  After all, even the scroll handles of volute kraters had been metallic originally.  Also, here you have in vase-painting a Centauromachy  easily half a century later than the famous one at Olympia, with the drunken centaur party crashers grasping and otherwise attacking the Thessalian women at the wedding of Perithoos, the boon companion of Theseus.  Quite post-Periklean, abandoning gravitas in favor of action, it reminds us more of the frieze from Bassae, now in the British Museum

Finally, just to show a style that really does look later, which you can compare with sculptured friezes, and signed vases such as those by the Meidias Painter,  that really can be dated late in the fifth century, when the Peloponnesian War was going quite badly (yes, everyone should read Thucydides), I show this Centauromachy.

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And last, though I have no color photo to use for its kind, let us remember the great kraters that abandon the use of friezes altogether.  Of these, the krater illustrated in the linked album, nos. 17-21:

Ferrara, from Spina (unknown grave number).  Calyx krater.  This is one of the vases attributed by P. E. Arias to the Group of Polygnotos, which is not so attributed by Beazley or by S. B. Matheson in her book, Polygnotos and Vase-Painting in Classical Athens, Wisconsin, 1995.  It is, however, like some of the work properly attributed to that Group in evidently emulating major panel or mural painting of its generation.  Dating in the 430s seems appropriate.

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In addition to the books listed in the last posting, on the Brygos Painter, see

• N. Alfieri, P. E. Arias, and Max Hirmer, Spina, Munich, Hirmer Verlag, 1958

• Susan B. Matheson, Polygnotos and Vase Painting in Classical Athens, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1995

• adding, for Boardman, the volume for The Classical Period, World of Art, Thames and Hudson (for the English edition), 1989.

The Brygos Painter's Troy Cup

Another artist best of  his kind 

Paris, Louvre, G152, from Vulci.  Iliupersis kylix by the Brygos Painter.  A. Iliupersis
The woman with the pestle is labeled Andromache.  ARV2, 1962, 369, 1.

Paris, Louvre, G152.  Iliupersis kylix by the Brygos Painter.  B. Iliupersis; at right, Neoptolemos is about to kill King Priam, slinging his grandson's dead body at his head.

Probably a little younger than the Berlin Painter, the principal artist who painted the vases, mostly kylixes, made by Brygos (and may have been the potter himself) again, though evidently a full-time vase-painter, with more than 200 attributions to his hand of surviving work, was a truly great artist by any standards.  We have only to compare the work of the best artists in his Circle, and they are excellent themselves, to realize his greatness.  Perhaps the Kleophrades Painter, who also painted a Death of Priam (on the shoulder of a kalpis hydria [Boardman, Archaic RF, 135; ARV2, 1962, 189, 74] in Naples), perhaps slightly later or only different, can compete with him: equally powerful and tragic, but not so heartrending and not so so beautiful.  Both, however, may have had similar prototypes in mind, showing the young woman rushing to defend Troy with her pestle (representations of pestles are rare), and it is because the Brygos Painter labeled his 'Andromache' that Beazley called the unnamed girl on the hydria Andromache (?).

Nothing human is alien to the Brygos Painter.  Nothing seems to be difficult for him; though his drapery still uses the Archaic pleating, it moves perfectly with the action or attitude of the bodies.  Action, relevant action, unifies the compositions.  The fury of young Neoptolemos, the pitiable limpness of Astyanax's corpse, old Priam's loss of regal dignity all are unforgettably portrayed.  From the Brygos Painter, here and elsewhere in his work, we come to understand exactly how the full chiton, and how the heavy himation fell away from the woman as she fled in terror.

Boardman likes the Brygos Painter, too, and provides numerous pictures.

London, British Museum, E44, by Onesimos in the period when Panaitios was kalos, 
from Vulci.  ARV2, 1962, 318, 2.  Hetaira and older man.

As Beazley said, "The earlier work of the Brygos Painter runs parallel with the work of Onesimos in that artist's later—post-Panaetian—phase (p. 313), and has a good deal in common with it, but the temperament is different."  We cannot say that the Brygos Painter was a pupil of Onesimos or learned in his studio.  I never shall doubt, however, that the young Brygos Painter studied Onesimos in those earlier, Panaitios kalos, works, admired them greatly, understood them.  I illustrate a very old photo of the London cup that I love so much, where he leaves it to us to imagine the conversation between the woman and her companion.  Was the basket for a picnic?  What has gone awry?  Nothing could be more universally comprehensible than this picture.  Never mind that it is quite early in the 490s, I think, when drawing a female clad only in the thinnest linen must show her breasts  like profiles facing left and right.

Berlin, StM 2285, from Cerveteri, by Douris.  ARV2, 1962, 431, 48.

Douris, another full-time cup painter (with more than 200 surviving and attributed) is quite the opposite to the Brygos Painter and Onesimos, though it is he who seems actually to have 'come out of' Onesimos.  The school scene is so socially innocuous that it appears in hundreds of children's school books.  It is very charming, too, showing one boy dutifully playing his assigned tune on the tortoise-shell lyre and the perfunctory pupil confronting his master who unrolls the rotulus with a dreadfully mangled first line of an epic on it; his pedagogue, at right, will report to his parents.  But all the humanity is in the situation.  Douris himself has left us some sexual scenes; the funniest, on a psykter, shows a satyr in a backstand with a kylix (hollow stem helps) balanced on the tip of his erect penis.  Sheer horseplay (Boardman, Archaic RF, 299, London E 768, from Cerveteri; ARV2, 1962, 446, 262).  But here, as in the school scene, it is WHAT is illustrated, not how it is drawn, that is expressive.  His satyrs are not really drawn naughtily, as the Brygos Painter's are (Boardman, Archaic RF, 252, ARV2, 370, 13), stalking Hera, no less, who had been asleep; on the other side, they attack Iris.  You can see that I find Douris dull, but he usually draws really quite well.

Berlin, StM 2291, from Vulci, by Makron.  ARV2, 1962, 364, 52.

But what shall I say of Makron, the painter who worked for Hieron (both signatures occur).  Makron has rather loose anatomy; he has an awful time with wrists and hands.  But grace!  Gentle, charming grace.  Occasionally the Brygos Painter can manage the like, when he needs to, but it isn't his forte.  If you think the only cute pet goats are on YouTube, take a look at Paris's capering around his rock.  For this is the Judgment of Paris.  Hermes (do not try to justify his foreshortening), leads Athena, Hera with her scepter, and Aphrodite with four erotes, two on either side.  Makron is the truly idyllic one.  I'm sorry that my picture is a little fuzzy; I wanted to show the color.  It is sharp in Boardman, ArchaicRF, 310.  How odd that Ernest Gombrich in Art and Illusion should feel that this is still "conceptual" art!  When you consider the 7th-century Early Archaic that I have posted here. . .

Principal References:
I have given you enough already to get you going, but let me add for its wealth of photographs, T. H. Carpenter's Art and Myth in Ancient Greece (World of Art, 1991) and Arias, Hirmer, and Shefton, A History of Greek Vase-Painting (1962; Brian Shefton did not agree in everything with P. E. Arias, so the English edition does differ somewhat from the German one; also, the successor, with text by Erika Simon has most of the same pictures, and more, in the same order, but with her own text).  It is Max Hirmer's photos that you want!
I have cited Sir John Beazley's Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters, 2nd ed., 1962, before, if you have a library that possesses it.
And Sir John Boardman, Athenian Red Figure Vase Painters: The Archaic Period (I have both the 1975 and 1991 printings, and there are more, I think), is your best friend, as you already know from the Berlin Painter.

Homage to the Berlin Painter

The Berlin Painter
When we turn from fine but ordinary trade pottery to the masterpieces of the best Athenian vase painters, whom many scholars and critics already have studied closely, we feel that we need to take them one at a time, even one vase at a time, rather than in a survey.  Of no artist is this truer than of the Berlin Painter.

• The best place to begin is again, Sir John Boardman, Athenian Red Figure Vases: The Archaic Period, World of Art, 1975, reprinted several times with the publisher varying in successive decades and different languages.  The illustrations are from no. 143 to no. 161, and his discussion, pp 94–111 (including the unnumbered pages of images) is excellent.  The additional notes on p. 238 summarize almost all those given by Beazley in ARV2 and Paralipomena.

• The largest selection of pictures is in Perseus (many pages to scroll through):
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/artifactBrowser?object=Vase&field=Painter&value=Berlin+Painter&page=30

• Sir John Beazley's articles on the Berlin Painter are listed at the heading for this artist in his Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters, 2nd ed., Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1962, Ch. 15, pp. 196–214, updated (pp. 341–345) in his Paralipomena, 1971, for Ch. 15.  I do not have the second volume, by Carpenter, of Paralipomena, but for this well studied artist its references can wait.  When Beazley wrote on his best loved artists it was with great care and discernment.  The writing is not flowery or excessive in any other way, but it is worth reading for its own sake and many times over.  Repeatedly, as new vases appeared to be discussed, over three quarters of a century he wrote on the Berlin Painter, and all of it will repay close and thoughtful reading.

* * * * *

In 2002 with my first digital camera I was in Berlin.  I could not photograph the whole vase properly (and I knew that publications existed that do so), but I saw that I could capture some aspects of the name vase, the Berlin Amphora itself, that the books did not reveal: the texture of the clay and glaze-paint, the difference between the brushed lines (either really black or diluted to honey color) and the relief lines, and the effect of light on them.  The photos are far from professional, having been taken to supplement professional ones.  Glass cases and incident light also limited what I could do, but they were taken with available light and so convey something of the reality of the drawing and the pottery.

The main side of the Berlin Amphora (Boardman, no. 144,
Beazley ARV2, no. 1 (Berlin, St.Mus. 2160)

This is elegance of the highest order.  Other artists have not superimposed and contrasted the rustic satyr and the divine young Hermes in this way, with the fawn's scumbled coat (done with diluted glaze-paint) separating them.  The elongation of the bodies also is of a new kind.

The reverse side (B) of the Berlin Amphora.

On the back of the vase (and large vases usually do have a major and a minor side), the satyr looks a little inebriated.  The Berlin Painter as much as any artist at this date (the first decade of the fifth century, as carefully calculated from a great deal of cross-referencing), is just mastering the foreshortened shoulder of a body in profile.

In both photos, though, you can see how glaze-paint was applied more thickly around the contours to set off the figures clearly and how a relief line, using thick glaze-paint, is used for the main outlines and enables showing the strings of the lyre, black on black!  The plectrum in the satyr's left hand is done in that added purplish red.  Notice that, as every writer has observed, these satyrs are not hugely phallic.  Evidently, though Greek art seems never to have been ashamed of sex, urbanity is preferred.

You can study for yourselves and marvel at all the means used by the Berlin Painter to distinguish the overlapping figures on (A) from each other.

Leaving aside the question of whether the very early works that subsequent to the main list were added as juvenilia of the Berlin Painter are, or are not, really his, work like his namepiece are themselves Early.  This is worth noting because he continued to work down to about 460 BCE.

LouvreG192-ARV2 160 :DSCN2192.JPG
Herakles and Iphikles and the snakes

A stamnos (whether or not we use the name exactly as the ancients did) is in effect a wide-mouthed amphora (i.e., a wine vessel) with sturdy horizontal handles for lifting.  This one by the Berlin Painter shows Athena attending the diverse reactions of the infant Herakles and his fraternal twin to the snakes that had crawled into their bed (a couch, though children's mythologies usually say 'cradle').  The drawing is noticeably broader than on the Berlin Amphora, a decade or more earlier, but the reason that Athena looks more Archaic than the other women is that just at this time, when the generic style in Greek art turned more natural and sober, they began to deliberately retain Archaic or somewhat Archaic types for their deities—even while art generically Archaic was still quite alive and Early Classical (or "Severe") art was only developing.  With hindsight, we recall that in Christian art in the course of the 15th century the Virgin Mary continued to wear a European (more Netherlandish in the North) kind of Byzantine clothing, while, in the Gupta period in India, the physical appearance of the historical Buddha also had become fixed.

The Louvre is the greatest place for taking pictures, and this one exhibits particularly well the same technical traits, in the use of thick paint, relief lines, normal brush-drawn lines, and dilute glaze (N.B., Herakles was blond as a baby!).

Louvre G 371  Stamnos  Triptolemos  Evid. ARV2 158  "Late"  The Addenda on p. 1633 add another illus. in Recueil
Dugas, pl. 30, 2.  It is at about this stage that the Achilles  Painter learns from the Berlin Painter.

Yet another stamnos in the Louvre has one of the favorite subjects in Attic red figure of the first half of the 5th century: Demeter and Persephone with their torches, pouring a libation for Triptolemos as he sets out in his winged chariot (its team of snakes to pull it is not shown here).  This is still the Berlin Painter; we have, as you can see in the lists and read in Boardman, hundreds of works of his, enabling endless comparing and cross-referencing.  This is his late work, probably not earlier than c. 470 BC (I'd say, in the 460s).  He does not radically change his habits of rendering drapery and the figure, but we should note that younger artists, his disciples, such as the Providence Painter, Hermonax, and, most important of all, the Achilles Painter are already working at the same time.  As for the Achilles Painter, he will be the teacher of the Phiale Painter who worked in the 430s.

They are a continuum, but another artist, trained in a different workshop, that of Myson from which a whole group of Mannerists issued (Beazley, ARV2, pp. 237–238), was, as Beazley said, a Mannerist "but far above them: an exquisite artist".  No doubt about his training with Myson, but the Pan Painter  obviously admired and emulated the Berlin Painter, and by preference the Early Berlin Painter.  This is interesting because it shows that these artists took themselves and their colleagues seriously, as artists, not merely as competitors.

By the way, you will have noticed that among those mentioned above, only Hermonax and Myson are known by their signing their names.  Can the great Berlin Painter have been illiterate?  Could have been.  Or so refined that he didn't like labels all over the place.  Quite possibly.  The same answers might apply to the Pan Painter (Boardman, nos. 335–349), but not to hacks.  Yes, there were hacks.  So also in the Renaissance, in Cubism, you name it; there always are.  

Also, remember that, by the time the Pan Painter decorated the great bell krater in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (Boardman, no. 335) habitually Archaic art was a thing of the past; the Pan Painter had to re-create it for himself.  Also, even a mannerist isn't always a mannerist: the Busiris pelike in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens (Boardman, no. 336), as vigorous, as hilarious, as it is masterly, isn't manneristic at all.  And, if you want to know what Greeks thought of circumcision, just study it: as neat a piece of racial/ethnic profiling as exists anywhere.

The Archaic Lion from Miletos

What makes Miletos special?

Berlin StMus 1790 Length 1.76m.  Dated mid-6th century

In one of his earlier World of Art volumes, on Greek Sculpture: The Archaic Period (1978), John Boardman put Architectural Sculpture, then Reliefs, and last of all Animals and Monsters at the end of the book.  The lions, separately rendered, are usually guardians, whether of tombs or of sanctuaries.   Boardman says, "apparently one of a pair", because exhibited right beside this one is the more battered rear one-third of another just like this one.

The Archaic lion from Miletos is very large for a grave, perhaps, and unique in all respects, I think.  When my old cat comes in muddy to the skin and half exhausted from ill advised fighting, he settles on his rug after only a bite or two and a sip of water and rests for hours, mostly asleep.  That is what big cats, males, do in the savannahs, on all those nature shows of television.

Face of Lion from Miletos

Why are all the lions from Egypt, beautiful as they are, so much less like real cats than this one?

Consider Tutankhamen's in the British Museum.  Consider the Corinthian lions in Boston and Copenhagen, figs. 207 and 208, in Boardman's GrSc: Archaic, a little earlier than the Miletos one and (for the reclining one) only one meter long, which Humfry Payne dated in Necorcorinthia (1931),  studying comparatively large sculpture together with metalwork and, of course, Corinthian black figure vases.  They are very Greek themselves, but almost as hieratic as Egyptian ones.  It is not that the Miletos lion is very realistic (but neither is the Late Classical one, which merely incorporates what Greek art had learned about nature in a couple of centuries and then stylizes the anger, as Pergamene sculpture will, and uses the formula for a lion's mane that is standard, too.

Berlin St Mus Late Classical lion from Attica, dated c. 330 BCE

This Late Classical lion surely, I think, guarded a tomb, though I can't say in the Kerameikos, because Athens is not the only town with a cemetery or, for that matter, the only city or town in Attica.  But there are many guardian lions in Greek art, from this time onwards, of basically this lion type, not least the Macedonian ones but also those from Magnesia in the Louvre.  I only found this image first.  They are no longer like the Egyptian lions that inspired the Greek use of lions as guardians, but Greek art had settled on a stereotype, which this fine one, tensed to strike with his right paw, exemplifies.

The Miletos lion is wonderfully abstracted in the planes of his flesh and skin over his skeleton.  His face is both still and watchful, very cat-like in this respect.  Everything about him bespeaks a great sculptor doing something new and unique, feline and human.  You can tell: I really love the Miletos lion.  So I give him to you here.

The Egyptian museum at Turin in northern Italy has a lion that I'd like to ask you all about, especially if you know that museum.  It had no label, but I knew nothing just like it.  I don't know where it was found in Egypt (but the museum is old, so it is not a recent find).  I am sure that it is post-Saitic, but whether it is Ptolemaic in date (as I doubt), or Roman Empire, or Late Roman Empire (as I suspect), I do not know.  Perhaps a reader of this blog can tell me.  I didn't have time in Turin to buy a book about the collection.

Turin, Egyptian Museum.  Lion, waiting for a date and other data.

Now, is that cute, or what?  Not stereotyped, either, though in exactly one of the poses and perfectly four-sided form that are age-old in Egypt.  It is not a masterpiece, not utterly unique like the Miletos lion, but it certainly isn't despicable.  I wish Turin would make greeting cards of him!

As for Ionian art, Berlin is one place to go for that.  They have one of the maidens dedicated to Hera by Cheramyes (the Louvre has the one known the longest, about which unutterably silly characterizations used to be written).  It is worth learning German well if only to read the publications on the kouroi discovered in the last several decades.  Great kouroi, and quite different from the Athenian ones, though the Athens Kerameikos cemetery is also a German Archaeological Institute excavation.  I can't put up images saved only for study of any of that material, but I do urge everyone to go to Berlin and Samos and to the Athens Kerameikos Museum (if only austerity doesn't mean closing museums that don't have any gold masks and the like).  A whole Greek world, complementary to what you probably have been taught from textbooks, awaits you there.

I can give you, though, a little kouros head hollow cast in bronze, about 2/3 life size as I recall, which I photographed through glass a decade ago.  You see how lovely and how unlike the more rugged art even of Athens and Corinth it is, yet it also is already unlike both Anatolian art and Egyptian art and the art of the places that will become Lebanon in our own time.

Berlin, StMus.  Bronze head of a kouros from the Samos excavations

P.S. I meant also to cross reference to the Marseilles pitcher in the Louvre, now itself assigned to Miletos.  See second image, with its discussion, in http://teegeeessays.blogspot.com/2011/11/iv.html

Peace and Wealth: Eirene and Ploutos

The Munich Eirene and Ploutos

The First of the Great Statues of a Goddess with an Infant

Kephisodotos, who was an Athenian and came from the circle of the pupils of Pheidias, created for Athens in AD 370 a statue that stood for Peace achieved after wearying intermittent wars (see any standard history for those; this is about the statue type).  There had been personifications in Greek art before; a red-figure vase-painter named Makron, for example,  had labeled a female figure on a skyphos Eleusis, meaning the city of the Eleusinian Mysteries, and of course there had been hundreds of Nikai (Victories).

But this statue, which is named in written sources, stood in Athens, and Kephisodotos was the father of the most famous of the Late Classical Athenian sculptors, Praxiteles: it is no accident that the Praxitelean statue of Hermes holding the infant Dionysos in the old temple at Olympia does recall the tender but dignified pose of this statue (of which we have only copies).  It represented Eirene (Peace) proudly holding Wealth (Ploutos).  Not that she was in any literal way his mother, but that peace engenders wealth by fostering trade and, of course, good relations generally.  No wonder that the two Greek princesses of the 20th century, Sophia (now queen of Spain) and her younger sister, Eirene—Irene in modern spelling—had been named Wisdom and Peace.

Once the Eirene and Ploutos of Kephisodotos became well known, and that was quickly, the adjunct infant became a popular motif, whenever appropriate, throughout later Greek and Greco-Roman art.  It might be Aphrodite with Eros sitting on her shoulder.  It might be a regional goddess associated in cult with a divine infant (in which case we might not know their names).  It might be a special aspect of Tyche (Fortuna), Euposia,  holding an infant just like Ploutos.

Made to stand outdoors, the statue by Kephisodotos was of bronze, but the copies that we have, mostly fragmentary but careful pointed copies, are of marble.  Sometimes you see the Munich copy in photos of the 19th century with modern arms, but the only time we actually have arms is in a tiny sketch of the statue on one of those Panathenaic amphoras, not only prize trophies but containing a goodly amount of fine Athenian olive oil.   Luckily, the Munich copy is one of the finest copies of the Empire period that we possess.  I am sorry that I don't have new digital images of her.

Though the Munich statue is very well preserved, it has been smoothed, perhaps even before the museum obtained it, but we have of Ploutos alone an exquisite and never abusively cleaned copy in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.  I particularly like my grayscale photos taken for teaching (so I provide the data given for my students) nearly 30 years ago:

Athens, NAM  #175  Ploutos, from a copy of Kephisodotos's Eirene and Ploutos (q.v.), found in the harbor of Piraeus in 1881.  The black-and-white photos show the delicate (also unretouched) character of the Ploutos and the genuinely infantile structure of his body and posture.  The side view also shows the stump of the cornucopiae supported by Eirene's hand (only stumps remain of the fingers) under Ploutos's buttocks.

I also have some details in color:

I have always liked to stand in the museum, as the light changed (for this museum has windows), and try to envisage the whole statue standing in Athenian sunlight, in bronze.

*****

Now, I promised this posting to someone who commented on my using La Vierge de Paris alongside the Artemis from Gabii, at the head of my last blog here in Opera Nobilia.  I only meant that the graceful, swaying pose goes all the way back to the graceful, slender late Praxitelean pose of the Artemis, and that French Gothic was especially fond of it.  But my correspondent felt that somehow it meant that the Virgin replaced a Greek goddess.  In a sense she did—but not Artemis!

As we have seen here (and it is plain in all of Greek art), when an artist devised a new and useful and lovely composition, such as an adult deity (or an old satyr, for that matter) holding up a baby, every successive generation would endeavor to do its predecessors one better in exploiting the pose.  Of course, it had to be a story in which it made sense.

When Virgil in his Fourth Eclogue, proclaimed a messianic prince, he was flattering Augustus, but from early Christianity onwards the Church interpreted it as they did Types in the Hebrew Bible: that is why Dante has Virgil as his guide in the Divine Comedy!  And that is why, in the Louvre, we have a fine statue of a Julio-Claudian empress, usually thought to be Messalina holding the infant Britannicus; never mind how Robert Graves depicts Messalina in I, Claudius.  

And it is such use of the ancient Greek beneficent Eirene holding an infant that boded well-being, all to flatter the Imperial family and keep encouraging the association of the empress with goddesses (as the Ptolemaic queens already had done, too) that links the Eirene and Ploutos to the many Gothic statues of Mary holding up the Baby Jesus, such as the Vierge de Paris.  

My correspondent was a Protestant, and I, too, in a Presbyterian family was brought up to regard Mary as suspect, somehow, yet I can assure him that the sculptors, who traveled quite a bit, knew a good pose when they saw it, to convey the messianic idea.  But they didn't think Mary was Aphrodite or Demeter or Hera!  The sculptor working for Claudius may have had the empress as Juno (Hera) in mind, but the sculptors working for the 13th-century bishops and abbots certainly didn't!  Even Bernard of Clairvaux would never have thought such a blasphemy.  Not even John Calvin, I think.

*****

I just located one of the early 3rd c. AD coins that show a Tyche (Fortuna) holding an infant like Ploutos and with her hand supporting the cornucopiae (horn of plenty), which the infant in turn rests his left hand on, so that the motif is very surely based on the Eirene and Ploutos of Kephisodotos.  This coin was issued for Diadumenian, the son of Macrinus, at Nicopolis ad Istrum in present-day Bulgaria, but it is not the only one with Tyche Euposia shown as here.