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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 October 2013
‘The vases of the classical period are but the reflection of classical beauty; the vases of the archaic period are archaic beauty itself.’ So Beazley; an indisputable and valuable truth, but a truth that needs some explanation. In spite of all the detailed work that has been done in the last fifty years and more on the development of Greek vase-painting and its relation to other arts, its nature still remains something of a problem. The issue is confused, of course, by the fact that vase-paintings are almost our only original Greek drawings—almost the only key-hole through which we can peep at archaic and classical painting—and this gives them an importance independent of their intrinsic worth.
1 This equivocal attitude is fostered by the practice of reproducing drawings of vase-paintings instead of photographs. Drawings are an indispensible adjunct to photographs for the specialist, but mainly harmful in a wider use. Photographs are inevitably distorted, but for this very reason remind the reader that the picture is not only a picture but the decoration of a vase. Flattened drawings, apart from the interposition of the modern draughtsman's mind and hand, obliterate the memory of the vase whose form conditioned the character of the picture.
2 It is noteworthy that the charming little horses surreptitiously introduced on a few Protogeometric vases (Kübier, , Kerameikos IV, pl. 27Google Scholar) are conceptual enough but not geometric. They have no connection with the Geometric figure-style proper, but are rather the last gasp of the sub-Mycenaean tradition of reducing naturalistic motives to formal cyphers. The plastic stag (ibid. pl. 26) is in similar case.
3 The practice of placing huge vases on tombs, where Mycenaeans before and archaic Greeks after placed reliefs or statues, might also be taken as an argument for the absolute primacy of pottery and vase-painting among the arts of the Geometric period.
4 Necrocorinthia, 92 ff. The suggestion, without the illusion, of recession in the Chigi battle, achieved by overlapping planes, which was noted by Payne as evidently derived from free painting, finds a close parallel in the metope of three seated goddesses. This has undergone re-painting of details at a later date, but clearly retains its original composition.
