The Medici Conspiracy (11 page)

Toward the end of the sixth century, the limitations of the black-figure technique, with its unrealistic color scheme, began to circumscribe artists
and the new technique of red-figure vases emerged: the figures were left the color of the clay (and so turned red when the vase was fired), and detail was indicated by fine lines drawn in black glaze or in lines of diluted glaze, which fired as dark brown or translucent yellow. The entire background was a luminous black. This gave the figures much the same appearance as if lit by modern theatrical lighting, making them more dramatic and far more realistic.

And it was now that the truly fine artists began to produce the really great masterpieces, with new subjects matching closely the contours of the vases, which themselves were developing new shapes as well, to match the sophisticated life that then obtained in Periclean Athens—its golden age under its great general and leader, Pericles (c. 495–429). The greatest generation of vase painters was known as the Pioneers (because they experimented with new techniques), and the three greatest names among them were Euphronios, Euthymides, and Phintias. Euphronios (fl. c. 520–c. 500 BC) signed eight Attic vases as painter and, later in his life, signed twelve cups as potter, decorated by other artists. He was particularly interested in showing the human body and experimented with foreshortening to give his compositions greater depth. He also produced a pillar monument on the Athenian Acropolis. Euthymides (fl. c. 515–c. 500 BC) signed eight Athenian vases, six as painter, the other two as potter. There is an inscription on an amphora by him in Munich that reads: “Euphronios never did anything this good,” generally interpreted as a playful challenge to the younger artist rather than a taunt. But it shows that artists were aware of each other's work. Phintias (fl. 520–500 BC) signed six vases as painter and three as potter. The spelling of his names varies, as he was not especially literate.

This period has been described as a
primavera
(a springtime) that painting would not see again until the Italian Renaissance. In other words, Euphronios, Euthymides, and Phintias are rightly to be regarded as the equivalent of Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci: They established the definition of excellence.

The next phase of Attic red-figure painters opened with the Berlin Painter and the Kleophrades Painter. The Berlin Painter is named after a large amphora in the Anitkensammlung (the Museum for Classical Antiquities) in Berlin. His figures so carefully match the shape of his vases
that many scholars believe he must have been the potter as well as the painter. Moreover, these figures have that clean simplicity and grace that we now call “classical.” The Kleophrades Painter (fl. c. 505–c. 475 BC) is named after the potter Kleophrades, son of (the black-figure painter) Amasis, whose signature appears on a large red-figure cup now in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. In this period, scenes are lightened in style, with playful borders, and there are fewer figures. It was also about now that cup painters begin to be distinguished from pot painters. Cup, or kylix, painting was perhaps the most intimate of all forms, given the vessel's use in symposia. The great cup painters were Onesimos, Douris (who produced 280 vases, signing forty), and the Brygos Painter.

Toward the end of the fifth century BC, vase painting underwent yet another change, in that there arose a predilection for new compositions and certain mythological subjects. Scholars now think this was as a response to a great efflorescence of wall painting in Athens, which has been lost. This is thus an added reason for the importance of vase painting of this late period. A favorite subject was the battle between the Athenians and the Amazons, a mythical precursor of the more recent victory of the Athenians over the Persians. In this new stylistic period, the human body is shown in very varied, but very loose poses; there is much more foreshortening and drapery folds lose their rigidity, to both conceal and yet reveal the body beneath. (Much the same was happening in sculpture.)

Following the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War in 404 BC, Athens lost its market in the West. This marks the point when local vase painting began to flourish elsewhere. Apulian and Gnathian painting (Gnathia was a town in Apulia, in southern Italy) became briefly fashionable. By the end of the fourth century BC, however, red-figure vase production came to an end in all parts of the ancient world.

Pottery is the most important material for the study of antiquity because it was produced in great quantities over several centuries and survives in abundance.

This tribute to the “poorly drawn and average” vase was written by none other than Dietrich von Bothmer.

Among the first connoisseurs to amass a major collection of vases was Sir William Hamilton. A member of the Society of Antiquaries, he was appointed the British plenipotentiary at the court in Naples, where he formed not one but two collections of Greek and Etruscan ceramics. The first collection, which consisted of 730 objects, was sold to the British Museum in 1772 for £8,400. His second collection was even finer than the first, consisting of vases recently excavated—and he sent it to England to be sold. Part was lost at sea, but the remainder reached London and was auctioned. This auction did much to influence taste in England, one man who fell under the spell being Joshua Wedgwood. He developed a modern version of Greek and Italian vases (at his plant called “Etruria”) that became so fashionable that at times they sold for three times as much as the real thing. Hamilton's main rival in Italy was the Frenchman Vivant Denon, later to be instrumental in the creation of the Musée Napoleon, now the Louvre. His collection of Greek and Etruscan vases comprised 520 pieces. A tourist guide published in 1775 listed forty-two collections with vases around Europe, in eighteen cities.

The revival of interest in ancient Greece—stimulated by the excavations south of Naples and Winckelmann's writings—was one of the main factors giving rise to the neo-classical movement in the arts that engulfed Europe around the turn of the nineteenth century. Romantics, too, were in thrall to the classical world, not just Byron but his fellow poet John Keats, who famously wrote his “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” containing the lines:

Thomas Hope, a Dutch connoisseur who settled in London in the late eighteenth century, had three rooms of his house in Duchess Street, Portland Place, filled with vases.

This interest continued to grow in the nineteenth century, fueled by excavations further north than Pompeii and Herculaneum. George Dennis's book
Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria
, first published in 1848, celebrated the “sublime” and “perfect” quality of the vases that the excavations had uncovered, and collections in other European capitals, after Paris and London, began to make their appearance—in Berlin, Basel, Copenhagen, St. Petersburg, Vienna. In Munich, the collection of Ludwig I was exhibited at the Pinakothek as a “Prologue to the Renaissance.” The finds at Vulci, many of which were discovered on the land of Lucien Bonaparte, were exhibited with the inscription “The Raphaels of Antiquity.” The discoveries initiated what has been called “the golden age of vase collecting.” The collection of Marchese Gianpietro Campana was formed at this time and, at 3,791 pieces, was probably the largest ever assembled. The United States followed toward the end of the century. E. P. Warren was responsible for the vase collection in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He settled in Rome, one of several vase scholars resident at the end of the nineteenth century, where the Piazza Montanova became an antiquities market every Sunday. With the establishment of chairs of classical archaeology in universities across Europe and North America in the nineteenth century, many institutions acquired study collections. In 1898, Adolf Loos, the modernist designer in Vienna, wrote that “Greek vases are as beautiful as a machine, as beautiful as a bicycle.”

In the early twentieth century, connoisseurship took another step forward when the British academic J. D. Beazley introduced so-called Morellian techniques into the appreciation of Greek vases. Beazley, an Oxford scholar, was “much involved” with the poet James Elroy Flecker. He became Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and an honorary fellow of the Met in New York. Giovanni Morelli was an Italian art historian of
the late nineteenth century (he was a big influence on Bernard Berenson) who adapted Freudian techniques to connoisseurship. Originally involved in trying to understand early Renaissance painting, where many pictures are unsigned, he formed the view that painters betray their identity in what we might call the “unconscious” parts of their pictures—those areas such as the ears, eyebrows, or ankles, where they are perhaps not paying full attention or which do not form part of the main message of the work. These features, Morelli said, are invariably highly similar from one painting to another by the same artist. Beazley adapted this method to identifying Greek vases, and it enabled him to group them together, either by attributing them to painters who had signed a few vases or by assigning such titles as the Berlin Painter or the Villa Giulia Painter where there was no signature. In these cases the painter was named after his masterpiece. Over the years, these painters could be credited with an oeuvre, even a career, in which his painting style developed, matured, and (perhaps) declined. In providing names and identities in this way, Beazley gave new life to the market in vases. His accomplishment was a perfect scenario for collectors and dealers, helping transform an anonymous mass of objects into the archaeological equivalent of, say, the market in old masters. Other scholars subsequently did the same for vase painters in other areas of the classical world. This approach was so successful that George Dennis's book
Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria
was republished in 1985.

Today, Greek and Etrurian vases still evoke great passion and are actively traded. Since World War II, seventy-one private collections have been sold at auction. In the United States, apart from Boston, the great vase collections are at the Metropolitan in New York (formed between 1906 and 1928 and added to in 1941 and 1956), the Duke University Classical Collection at Durham, North Carolina, and the San Antonio Museum (formed in the 1990s). Several major collections costing several million dollars each have been assembled since World War II. Among archaeologists the passions are no less strong, though they have to do with different matters—for example, with whether the vases in these collections have been illicitly excavated, and whether these vases were quite as valuable in ancient times as some people say. Either way, these ancient objects still have the power to evoke passionate emotions.

After Etruria and Greece, Rome. The Roman reverence for the Greek way of life, its thought and artistic achievements, was one of the dominant ideas throughout the long life of the Roman Empire. When we speak now of “the classics,” as often as not we mean Greek and Roman art and literature. But it was the Romans who invented the very notion of the classics, the idea that the best that has been thought, written, painted, and designed in the past is worth preserving and profiting from.

Also, the Romans had a notion of
utilitas
—by which they meant utility, unsentimentality, and pride in Roman achievements—and this had a major effect on innovation in the visual arts. Portraits had become more realistic in Greece, but they were still idealized, to an extent. Not so in Rome. The emperor might want his likeness to echo the dignity of his office, but for other families the more realistic, the better. There was a tradition in Rome, among patrician families at least, of keeping wax masks of one's ancestors, to be worn by living members of the family at funerals. Out of this custom there developed the Roman tradition of bronze and stone busts that were, above all, realistic. This is why Roman sculpture is so vivid, valuable, and sought after.