Figure 12.6 The Dipylon Amphora. Geometric vase found in the Kerameikos cemetery, Athens. National Archaeological Museum, Athens
The second of the two famous cemeteries of early Greece belongs to Athens and has been long under excavation: the Kerameikos cemetery just outside the Dipylon Gate on the north-west outskirts of the city. Since the ancient Greeks believed the dead to be ritually polluting, cemeteries were always placed outside the city limits, as here. In this, the main cemetery of Athens, burials have been discovered dating from Late Helladic IIIC through the Roman Empire. During the later eighth century BC, the wealthier cremation graves in the Dipylon sector were marked with enormous vases up to 1.75m in height, decorated in the distinctive Geometric style that gives its name to the entire period. The pots, either amphoras (a shape with narrow mouth and two vertical handles) or kraters, had perforated bases or bottoms to allow liquid offerings and rainwater to trickle into the earth below. The careful, elaborate decoration consists of countless horizontal zones filled with meanders, lozenges, and other motifs that frame broader bands in which funerary scenes are depicted (Figure 12.6), all painted in black glaze on the natural orange-red clay of Attica. Humans and animals are shown largely in silhouette, their bodies a cartoon-like combination of triangles, cylinders, circles, and lines. In the arrangement of the figures, clarity of understanding was the paramount goal. If horses stood side by side, the painter made sure the viewer could count how many there were. Each head, leg, and tail was painted separately. In the scene that shows the laying out of the body of the deceased, each element — the corpse, the bier and its legs, and the shroud — would be painted individually without overlapping other features. This emphasis on the conceptual rather than the optical reality has a long tradition in the arts of the cultures surveyed in this book. Egyptian art comes to mind in particular. In Egyptian tombs, the precision of the rendering had a practical purpose: the complete outline guaranteed the completeness of the object in the afterlife. But 200 years later, as we shall see, Greek pot painters would shatter this tradition.
World History
