The Unique Style Of Greek Ceramics

Ancient Greece, as one of the cultural and artistic origins of western civilization, has created and developed various types of art styles including ceramics, sculpture, architecture and so on. Among, ceramics in an indispensable branch in Ancient Greek art: Greek people mixed clay with water, and this enabled them to get potteries in double colors - red and black. The unique style of Greek ceramics plays a vital role in world ceramic history.

The amphora is a two-handled ceramic jar in the archaic period of Ancient Greece which is 53.2 centimeters in height. It is used as a container to store foodstuffs, including liquid such as olive oil and wine or goods like dried fishes and cereals. It also functions as a decoration for displaying. The pattern on both sides of the vase depicts Herakles, who is the greatest hero in Greek mythology, wearing lion skin, holding a sword upwards and a rope, is driving a bull to sacrifice (MFA). Though patterns of decoration on the vase do not precisely match with each other, the proportion and posture of Herakles and the bull are almost the same. Herakles, as one of the most well-known and influential heroes in Greek mythology, is a typical enduring object for Greeks painters to depict on their work (MFA).

One of the significant characteristics of this type of Greek ceramics is the area painted with slip will turn black after the firing process, while the unpainted area will keep its original dark red color. If observing closely to the vase, it is clear that the surface of black, painted areas presents a smoother skin glaze than red areas which are unpainted. Though it looks quite similar to other ceramic artworks in the same or close period which makes it not conspicuous, this vase is unique among other vases because two different drawing techniques are used on the amphora: black-figure and red-figure techniques.

Both of two techniques share similarities that they are all painted with slip, which is a mixture of red clay and water, on ordinary red clay, yet they were developed and used in different time periods. The black-figure technique was developed firstly in other civilization around the Mediterranean such as Attica during the middle of 7th century, B.C.E. (Beazley, 4), and gradually spread to the Athenian area. Lysippides Painter drew the black-figured side, while Andokides Painter, who was active approximately during 530-515 B.C.E. (Boardman, 15), drew the red-figured side. The red-figure technique reverses the space of painted area and the unpainted area and looks exact inverted from black-figure techniques, but allow painters to depict images more detailedly.

Instead of painting figures in black with slip and leave the outline unpainted, Athenian painters would be able to delineate the outline of figures and blacken background areas or other decoration. Details show the advantages of the new techniques: For instance, when portraying the lion skin which Herakles wears, many short and curvey lines are used to illustrate the texture of lion skin, yet more tiny hooks of line exist in the black-figure side. The inner lines of an object should be reserved in advance before the black areas painted when using the black-figure techniques, which results in the outlines look slack. On the contrary, red-figure painters only need to take a brush or other artistic tools to line draw on the clay, which looks much smoother than black-figure.