[Gutenberg 61986] • Greek vase-painting (Griechische Vasenmalerei)

Excerpt from Greek Vase-Painting

A history of Greek vase-painting has been for a long time a desideratum of students of Greek art and antiquity. Many years ago I planned such a work, but the difficulty of the necessary illustration caused the plan to break down. In the meantime an extensive literature has grown up on the subject, mainly in German, but with contributions from other countries. In his first chapter Dr. Buschor has shewn how the result of excavation in Greece and Italy has been to throw our starting-point further and further back, until it lies in the Neolithic age. But it is not only in regard to the earlier phases of Greek vase-painting that research has brought light: the red-figured vase-painting which is one of the most perfect fruits of Greek art in the fifth century has been far more minutely and intensively studied. The result has been to fix the outlines, and more than the outlines, of the history of a fourth great branch of Greek artistic activity; the history of architecture, of sculpture and of coinage having been already thoroughly investigated. And this fourth branch is not merely vase-painting; but since the fresco and other paintings of the great age of Greece have almost entirely perished, we may fairly say that it includes almost all that we can ever know of the history of early Greek painting. Vase-paintings can but feebly image the colouring of the great painters of Greece; but they can give us invaluable information as to the principles of grouping and perspective adopted by them; they can reflect the extreme beauty of their figure-drawing; and they can shew us how they treated subjects from the vast repertory of Greek mythology and poetry.