Ceramic Art in Later Archaic Times

By the last third of the seventh century BC, Corinthian fine ware production has shifted toward the “Black-Figure” (BF) style (Figure 10.3), where the objects portrayed are silhouetted in glossy black paint against the bright yellow-orange of the natural color of the pot’s clay. Details are picked out in white or with incisions. Similar BF wares were then produced in other city-states during the late Archaic era of the sixth century, notably in Athens, where the boom in urban and rural population, including many resident aliens specializing in trade and craft production, reflected the

Figure 10.3 Black-Figure Attic vase, typical fine ware from the late sixth to early fifth centuries BC.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Henry Lillie Pierce Fund/ The Bridgeman Art Library.

Figure 10.4 Red-Figure Attic calyx krater depicting Hercules wearing a laurel wreath with Athena and other Greek heroes, typical fine ware from the fifth to fourth centuries BC.

Niobid Painter (ca. 475-450 BC). Louvre, Paris/The Bridgeman Art Library.

Deliberate stimulus to the economy given by the Peisistratid dictatorship.

A further development in ceramic figure-painting attained an unparalleled sophistication in Athens in the final decades of the sixth century, lasting in popularity as a Mediterranean-wide export ware into the fourth century or earliest Hellenistic era: Red-Figure (RF) ceramics (Figure 10.4). Now the black gloss paint is confined to the non-figural areas as background for the representations, which are left in the natural red-brown clay color, but with details outlined with black and other fine paint lines. This transformation allows far greater refinement ofportrayal, encouraging artists to develop personal styles of extraordinary beauty and expression. Individual examples of a particular artist’s or workshop’s output have been recognized through distinctive artistic traits in elaborate connoisseurship by Beazley and later Boardman (Whitley 2001). Although RF wares are widely produced, Athens in the Classical centuries dominates the extra-Aegean market and also supplies a significant minority of RF wares to other Aegean states, to be used alongside their own versions.

On a lesser scale, white-background wares now appear with similar subtle scenes in varied color, especially for burial use and the female boudoir, such usage reflecting their more fragile surface decoration.