|
|
He calls himself ‘the third Polygnotus’. If you wield a paintbrush in Athens, you cannot claim that name without being extraordinarily good at what you do. The name has resonance. The first Polygnotus was from Thasos. He didn’t do vases, which he probably considered beneath him. But then, that Polygnotus was exceptionally good at murals.
Walk along the Panhellenic Way towards the Parthenon and as you enter the Agora, between the Royal Stoa and the Stoa of Hermes, the Painted Stoa is in front of you and slightly to the left. A stoa is a long, roofed colonnade, which allows public business to be conducted even in foul weather. These stoas are decorated, and none more so than the Painted Stoa. It is famous throughout the Greek world for its epic paintings by that famed artistic duo, Micon of Athens and Polygnotus of Thasos.
The first Polygnotus contribution was an epic work depicting the fall of Troy. The artist also contributed to a depiction of the Battle of Marathon by Panaeus, a close relative of that Pheidias who made the statue of Athena Parthenos and the Zeus at Olympia. In fact, Panaeus also painted much of the Olympia statue. Polygnotus did not paint on commission, as he was independently wealthy and did not need the money. Rather, he painted to exercise his prodigious talent, and to give back to the city that adopted him.
The second Polygnotus was a specialist in large vases: amphorae, hydria – the pots used for hauling water – and kraters, the large open bowls used for mixing wine at parties.6 Smaller vessels are for drinking, or making sacred libations to the gods.
Polygnotus the second was a busy man because pottery is ubiquitous in Athenian life. The very rich like their bowls made of expensive metals, but everyone else uses pottery. Pots are everywhere, from decorative urns designed to awe guests in the andron to lumpy cookery pots and the (sometimes remarkably elegant) chamber pots beneath the beds. In fact, the ‘third Polygnotus’ has seen a pottery drinking cup that depicts a woman using a chamber pot. The range of subjects on Athenian crockery is remarkably diverse.
Rather like Attic silver, Athenian pottery is coveted across the Mediterranean world for its quality – not of the clay but the artwork upon it. Thousands of vases leave Athens every year, destined for places as far apart as Iberia and India.
To balance his workload, Polygnotus the second spent less time painting vases and more time roaming his workshop, dealing backhanded slaps and offhand praise to a dozen young painters whom he was training in his style. His best student was a youth called Kleophon. Later Kleophon launched his own studio in a building not far from the ‘factory’ of his master. (So many potters and painters work hereabouts that the area is commonly called the ‘Keremeikos’, the potters’ district.) Since the death of his former tutor four years ago, Kleophon has taken to calling himself ‘the third Polygnotus’.
Today Kleophon is in early. He has a long day ahead. Like his late master, Kleophon works mainly with large vases, in this case a decorative krater of the type known as a ‘volute’ (from the tight-curled handles at the top that resemble volutes, the curls at the top of architectural columns). The client is the playwright Euripides, who wants a vase to celebrate his new play Herakles. When Kleophon suggested painting something related to the Herakles myth, the elderly playwright disagreed. Having worked with the over-muscled hero for the past year, Euripides wanted something different for a change.
In the end, the pair agreed on a painting showing a procession to Apollo, god of theatre and the arts. The god will be seated in a peristyle that contains two bronze tripods of the kind awarded to winning playwrights at the Dionysia. The overall painting is complex, so Kleophon needs an early start.
Naturally, he will not paint the figures themselves, but the space around them. Like all contemporary vase painters, he uses the red-figure style. This involves painting on a deep, lustrous slip. This ‘slip’ is not the consequence of incautiously treading on the contents of an unsocially emptied chamber pot (a sadly common experience), but a special clay – a highly refined slurry painted over the normal clay of the vase that turns black in the intense heat of a furnace.
The actual process is more complex. Left to itself the slip bakes very much as does normal clay. To get that deep black, the furnace is first left open, allowing the clay to bake red. It bakes red because Athenian clay is secondary clay, washed downriver during heavy rains. The clay picks up iron particles in the process because the river also washes over beds of iron ore. When baked these iron fragments oxidize and give the clay its distinctive rusty colour. Compare this with, for example, Corinthian pots of clay dug from the original beds. Rich in kaolin and containing little iron, Corinthian pots are creamy white.
KLEOPHON’S COMPLETED PROJECT, 2,500 YEARS LATER
The slip used to paint a red-figure vase is finer than the clay of the rest of the vase, and bakes faster. When the furnace is closed, the air supply is limited and uncured ‘green’ wood is added to the fire. Now the slip develops its shiny black texture through the chemical process of reduction. Once the slip has changed colour, the fire is reopened and baking is completed at a lower temperature.
In the dawn light, Kleophon circles his pot like a predator assessing angles of attack. The unbaked clay was prepared by his potter the previous evening. Over the past few days he has been refining river-clay by mixing it with water and removing impurities as they sink to the bottom of the mixing bowl. For crude cooking pots, this is done once – if at all. This is a prestige project, however, that will advertise the good taste of Euripides and the skill of Kleophon. The silky-smooth clay has been purified half a dozen times.
Once he adjudged the clay to be sufficiently fine, the potter laid it on a flat wheel some two feet wide. An apprentice turned the wheel at a careful and constant speed while the potter drew up the clay with his hands. After the completed bowl had been drying for ten hours and had a firm, leathery texture, the potter took a fine chamois leather cloth and ‘burnished’ the clay. This lines up the microscopic platelets on the surface, making it harder and smoother. The base and handles lie nearby on cloth cushioned by sand, waiting to be affixed once they will not get in the painter’s way.
Kleophon studies a set of six clay tiles showing the two pictures that he intends to transfer on to the clay. On the main, upper panel, Apollo himself is to recline in the peristyle (technically known as a sacrellum), which is shaped like one of the little temples in his honour called Odeons.
The pictures show that the procession is formed of six unbearded adolescents garlanded with wreaths and wearing thin, ceremonial tunics that leave one shoulder bare but reach to the ankles. At the head of the procession is a woman carrying a sacrificial basket on her head. Kleophon frowns at the woman. Her multilayered, pleated dress with rich embroidery is going to take hours of painstaking work to transfer to the vase – and mistakes on clay are demonically hard to hide.
A figure welcoming the procession on behalf of Apollo stands beside the bronze tripods. Kleophon wants this to suggest Euripides, but not resemble him so closely that the vase becomes a vanity portrait. So the man is older than the youths in the procession, but not so old as Euripides. The beard is black instead of grey (anyway, grey needs a specially coloured clay slip and Kleophon is busy enough this morning). The man’s walking staff is a type that Euripides favours, shoulder height with a T-shaped crossbar at the top.
Apollo himself (and Kleophon offers a mental apology to the god for this) is handsome but nondescript. In subtle ways the vase will draw attention away from the god and towards the non-portrait of the sponsor who commissioned the work. So the woman bearing the basket looks at ‘Euripides’, as does Apollo himself. Having everyone stare at the central figure would be a bit obvious, so Kleophon has the first man in the procession look not at Euripides or Apollo, but back over his shoulder. Meanwhile the branch of sacred laurel which Apollo holds inclines away from himself towards Euripides.
Overhead, Apollo has slung the quiver of his bow on the rafters of the peristyle so that the bow also points away from the god and towards Euripides. Between Apollo and the playwright is the Omphalos stone, the traditional marker of the ‘navel of the world’ at Apollo’s shrine in Delphi. From the stone, the eye is drawn to the person whose leg is partly obscured by it – Euripides again.
A smaller, lower panel will again suggest the Dionysia without anything so vulgar as actually depicting it. Instead, a Dionysian cortège has satyrs and prancing maenads. The maenads (female worshippers of Dionysus) are known to rend their clothes in their religious frenzy but, so as not to draw attention from the main panel, Kleophon’s ladies show little more than a well-turned calf. Studying his preliminary pictures, Kleophon frowns, and with a charcoal stick adjusts the angle of the staff carried by one of the dancers so that – like the upturned palms of the dancers – it points to ‘Euripides’ in the panel above.
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
JOHN KEATS ‘ODE ON A GRECIAN URN’ 1819
Looking at the vase, Kleophon projects a mental image of the painting on to its surface, through long practice mentally adjusting for the curvature of the vase. He pauses, and with a muttered curse bends to study the vase’s surface. Where one patch of the vase surface was a bit too dry, the potter had moistened his leather strip to correct it. In the process, he allowed a drop of water to fall on to the unbaked clay. The drop instantly soaked into the dry surface. It created a blemish, but the potter was too experienced to try to correct it. He knew that Kleophon would pick up the mark and arrange his black slip to cover it, so rather than disfigure the surface further, the potter had simply turned the vase so that the stain would be clearly visible in the morning light from the window.
Now the fun begins. Kleophon picks up a charcoal stick and delicately marks the rough outlines of his picture on to the clay. Later he will dip into the slurry a ‘brush’ made with a single hair from a horse’s tail and draw his pictures with flowing freehand strokes. Occasionally, where a line is particularly important, Kleophon will score it into the clay with a fine needle. (He will fill in the groove with slip later, so that the surface is uniformly smooth.)
Kleophon is proud of his flowing, natural style. This is a lot easier to achieve on red-figure vases. The black figures of previous generations were stiffer and literally archaic in style, because all red lines on the black figures had to be painstakingly scratched out from the black slip once it had partly dried. It is so much easier just to paint the black around the figures and insert single lines within.
When red figures were introduced three generations ago by pioneers such as Euphronios, it produced controversy in the tight world of pottery. Yet the naturalistic poses and very human emotions which Kleophon is able to put on to the figures on his vases would be impossible otherwise. Kleophon knows that his painting is slightly derivative, for he consciously imitates the natural yet elegant lines of the Pheidias sculptures on the Parthenon. And why not? These portraits embody the spirit of the age, a reaching towards perfection which, while unattainable, challenges the next generation to get even closer.
Kleophon steps back to look at his preliminary outlines. Maybe the future will think his efforts crude and primitive, rather as his contemporaries look down on the roughly patterned pots of earlier times. Yet Kleophon knows that his generation is setting the bar high. In his mind’s eye, he can see his finished work. This vase will be a good one, he feels. Lively yet serene, the colours rich yet subtle.
Beat that, posterity!
