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Not so long ago, developing an informed appreciation for Greek vases, in particular fineware with painted scenes, was no easy matter for anyone aside from serious students and dedicated connoisseurs with access to the world’s museums. As for illustrated books, there wasn’t much between the affordable volumes of John Boardman’s Thames & Hudson paperback series, with their masterly text and plentiful but small and hard-to-see photographs in black and white, and expensive volumes with magnificent photos, mostly relegated to academic libraries. That’s all changed, largely because of the Internet, where high-resolution photographs of individual vases — on academic and curatorial websites with expert analysis, certainly, but also on the Flickr accounts of museumgoing tourists — let you zoom in on the tiny details in which much of the delight of Greek vase painting lies. But the lower cost of printing has also put beautifully printed large-format books within reach, and for readers getting interested in Greek vases for the first time, a coherent illustrated overview of the subject is invaluable and much more manageable on the page than on-screen.
A case in point is “The Greek Vase: Art of the Storyteller,” by John H. Oakley, a classical archaeologist at the College of William and Mary. Meant for general readers, Oakley’s book walks through the main styles and production centers of Greek figurative pottery, from about the mid-eighth century through the mid-fourth century B.C., stopping in at Corinth and Southern Italy, but with most attention reserved for the highly developed Athenian black- and red-figure work. Oakley provides a succinct primer on the different vessel forms, a varied array of cups, pitchers, storage jars, wine-mixing bowls, sacral implements and others. There is poetry in their names (kantharos, kylix, hydria, oinochoe, pelike), and it’s fun to gradually learn the shapes and to notice them turning up in so many of the painted scenes: sly self-reference by the painters (who also depicted potteries) or, more likely, a reminder of the ubiquitousness of these utilitarian objects in daily life.
Photo
Achilles and Penthesilea, painted by Exekias, circa 540-30 B.C.
CreditBritish Museum
Potters and painters occasionally signed their creations, and various working names have been applied to anonymous hands: That of “the Worst Painter” is a reminder that not all were consummate artists. In fact, despite the enormous charm, striking beauty and emotional power of much vase painting — with subjects domestic, comic, tragic, fanciful, somber or breathtakingly erotic — it wasn’t considered high art in the ancient world; in this sense, it’s not entirely inapt to compare it with the work of many graphic artists today. In any case, as Oakley puts it, these scenes are “our primary surviving visual images of ancient Greek life and myth,” and they seem to take us to a strange and intimate place, both tender and dangerous, not accessible through literature or the exalted but sometimes cold and aloof monuments of classical sculpture (a place, incidentally, where women, or at least some women, appear to live much richer lives than the written sources suggest).
A limitation of Oakley’s book is that it draws exclusively on the holdings of just two collections: the J. Paul Getty Museum and, especially, the British Museum. London has magnificent vases, of which there is proof on every page: the black-figure master Exekias’ amphora scene of Achilles killing the Amazon warrior queen Penthesilea, for instance, or another amphora with men harvesting olives, by the Antimenes Painter. But so too do New York, Boston, Berlin, Paris and Rome. Among the many masterpieces you won’t see here are Exekias’ cup with Dionysus on a ship engulfed in grape vines and surrounded by dolphins (in Munich), or the Sosias Painter’s red-figure portrait of Achilles dressing the wound of Patroclus (Berlin). You won’t find what Oakley, from his academic standpoint, calls the world’s most famous vase: the François krater, or wine-mixing bowl (Florence). Nor will you see what is in actuality today’s most famous, another krater with an exquisitely composed scene of Sleep and Death bearing away the body of the Trojan War hero Sarpedon, painted by Euphronios. That krater, now thought to have been looted from an Etruscan tomb in 1971, was sold to the Metropolitan Museum for $1 million the following year and repatriated to Italy with much fanfare in 2008.
But here’s another way of looking at it: After you have finished with Oakley’s competent, eye-catching and entertaining introduction, great discoveries still await, as you consult Boardman’s old books, look up specific vases on the Internet and magnify to your heart’s content.
THE GREEK VASE
Art of the Storyteller
By John H. Oakley
Illustrated. 155 pp. The J. Paul Getty Museum. $29.95.
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