THAT GREAT GREEEK POTTERY! by Sydney Greaves

That Great Greek Pottery!

by Sydney Greaves

The new Berkeley Gallery highlights the Greek and Greek-inspired pottery in our collection.  Greek pottery, even in ancient times, was considered to be the best of the best, prized and copied by cultures all over the Mediterranean region. The city of Athens became famous and wealthy not only for quality Pentelic marble, but also for marvelous clay deposits with iron oxide impurities that produce the famous rich red color.

Greek Pottery Techniques:  The invention of the potter’s wheel in Mesopotamia about 3250 BCE transformed pottery-making from an individual household duty to a mass-production craft.  Athenian potters and painters collaborated on pottery shapes and designs in pottery workshops located together in a section of the city known as Kerameikos (source of our word ceramic).

        The Greek potter’s wheel consisted of a heavy flat slab of stone, wood or clay, approximately 2 feet in diameter. A small central depression underneath the slab formed a socket for the pivot point on the base, allowing the slab to balance and turn easily.  The wheel was turned by young apprentice boys in the pottery workshop, allowing the master potter to use both hands to fashion the clay.  Usually only the body of the vessel was formed on the wheel, with feet, handles, and necks added separately.  Potters also still used the coil technique for very large vessels. 

        When the pot shaping was complete, the dried pot was finished with a wash of red iron oxide, polished, and handed over to the painters for decoration.  The “paint” used on Greek pottery is actually slip, a watered-down solution of clay. Consider the difficulty of painting designs on a clay pot with clay-colored slip!    The painters approached this problem by first incising, or lightly carving, the designs and decorative images onto the surface of the pot. These incised lines are sometimes still visible, but most become hidden by the application of the slip decoration. Painters did use the natural colors of different clays to produce a few variations, but most color on Greek pottery comes not from paint-pigments but from the firing technique.

        The finished pots were stacked in large, round wood-burning kilns with a hole in the top for air control. Firing was a three-step process of oxidizing (letting in lots of air), reducing (cutting off air), and then reoxidizing. The resulting chemical changes in the clay, both the vessel body and the painted-on slip, caused the striking color changes we see in traditional Black Figure and Red Figure pottery.

Styles of Decoration:  The earliest form of Greek vase painting, the Geometric, dates to around 1000 BC.  The Geometric style features horizontal bands of geometric shapes, linear patterns, and later stylized figures, in black against the plain clay body of the vase.

        In the 600s BCE, the city of Corinth developed its own pottery tradition featuring designs influenced by their trading contacts in Mesopotamia. This Corinthian style is demonstrated by the lovely Globular Aryballos (29.2009L) loaned to us by the Buffalo Museum of Science. The plain claybody acts as background for fantastic creatures like sphinxes and griffins, with space-fillers based on floral and astral shapes.

        The Black Figure style developed in Athens became prominent in the Greek world by the end of the 600s.  Black silhouetted figures with incised costume and facial details appear against the red background of the vase, as demonstrated by the Battle Scene Kylix (29.91) and Dionysian Kylix (29.90). Images from literature and mythology were most popular in Black Figure paintings.

        The invention of Red Figure pottery happened in Athens as well. By reversing the Black-Figure technique – painting the background instead of the figures – the red clay of the vessel lends the figures a much more life-like hue, and allows for greater painted detail.  The two techniques were used at the same time for quite a while, even on two sides of the same vase!!  Eventually Red Figure became the preferred style, used to show daily life and domestic scenes, as on the Bell Krater (69.6), Pelike (29.89), and Askos (43.2).  These vase-painted scenes provide us with an unparalleled record of life in the Greek world.

A Pot for Every Purpose:  The Greek vases surviving in museums all over the world represent only a tiny fraction of the millions produced and used by people throughout the Greek world for eating, drinking, cooking, harvesting, and ornamenting themselves.  Remember, these vases were not only “art works,” but useful, functional objects, with specific shapes for specific uses. The new Berkeley Gallery contains a feature case on Greek and Greek-influenced pottery, which is a fun and fascinating look at the variety of ways that clay could be shaped to form beautiful and useful objects.  Look for these vessel shapes on view, mainly in the Greek case area but also in the Etruscan, Roman, and Crossroads cases:

 

Alabastron – container for perfumes and oils

    (Roman glass 28.231)

Amphora – storage and transport of goods

    (Roman 44.51)

Aryballos – oils, small version for gymnasium         (29.2009L)

Askos – holding liquids for pouring and offerings

(43.2,  plus Carthaginian  25.41 and Persian 67.39  in Crossroad Gallery)

Bombylios – ceremonial baby feeder  (25.51)

Krater – mixing wine and water

    (69.6,  Mycenaean 51.203, 51.204))

Kylix  -- wine drinking cup (29.90, 29.91,

    Etruscan 51.180)

 

Lekythos – offerings of oils  (29.87.1-2)

 

Oinochoe  -- pitcher for pouring (Etruscan 51.179)

 

Pelike  -- storage jar (29.89)

Stamnos – storage jar  (Carthaginian 25.42)