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In the absence of significant examples of the major art of Greek painting, pottery has assumed an importance even beyond its own great intrinsic value. During certain periods and in certain localities the vase-painter was not content to decorate his pots with simple lines and plant motifs. He took his themes from mythology and the life around him, as did the panel and mural painters. Moreover, occasionally these vase-paintings are of the highest quality, and this is especially the case in the Attic pottery of the sixth and fifth centuries. In spite of the difference in technique and color scheme, they ca, therefore, give a realization of the extraordinary feeling for line, contour, and composition of Greek artists in general; and in adding these qualities in ones imagination to the colorful Roman murals, one can gain some perception of Greek pictorial art. Furthermore, Greek terra-cotta vases have survived in large numbers, for, once fired, they may be broken, but are otherwise practically indestructible.
Today we try to research creation and origin of Ancient Greek Wine Jar. The stands was made by Chicago Painter. We dont know his or her name, but its known some facts about it: Creation Date: High Classical Period, c. 450 B. C. Object Type: Decorative Arts and Utilitarian Objects Materials and Techniques: Earthenware, red-figure technique AMICO Contributor: The Art Institute of Chicago Owner Location: Chicago, Illinois, USA It was the gift of Philip D. Armour and Charles L.
Hutchinson... The Hutchinson was passionately interested in the fine arts, and in 1882, at the age of 28, he was tapped to be president of the Art Institute, serving until his death in 1924. In the fall of 1890 Hutchinson played a pivotal role in the successful founding of the new University by offering Frederick Gates and Thomas Goodspeed his personal support during their fundraising canvas among non-Baptist Chicago civic leaders. In the months that followed, Hutchinson's good name and solid reputation opened many doors that would have otherwise remained closed. Appropriately, Charles Hutchinson was named along with his close friend Martin Ryerson as a member of the first Board of Trustees of the new University of Chicago. He proved a dedicated supporter and found a special role as the chairman of the Trustees' Committee on Buildings and Grounds, which allowed him to exercise supervisory control over many of the most important construction projects in the first thirty years of University's history.
In 1901 Hutchinson gave the University $ 60, 000 for the construction of Hutchinson Commons, a central dining hall in the neo-Gothic Tower Group, whose design and planning gave great delight to the capitalist connoisseur. It has been found in sanctuaries and tombs, where they had been placed as offerings, and in or near private dwellings, where they had been thrown on dumps or in unused wells when discarded. They, therefore, present a continuous story from geometric to Hellenistic times. The Greeks emancipated the art of drawing from a conventional system of two-dimensional formulas and learned how to represent on flat surface three-dimensional figures as they appear to the eye. They mastered the problem of foreshortening, imparted volume to their figures, and introduced spatial relations into their compositions. Stands - A Greek wine jar, it characteristically has high shoulders, wide mouth, spreading lip, two horizontal handles on the shoulder, round body and a short neck.
These vessels were used for both storing and serving wine as attested to in literature and on vase painting. Mainly in red-figure, this Attic pottery was made during the last quarter of the 6 th century throughout the 4 th century B. C. Its shape grew taller and thinner with time ranging from twelve to fifteen inches in height. Greek vases were made to be used, but they were also prized for the refined shapes and decorations that we continue to admire today.
This Athenian Wine Jar (Stands) is called red-figure because the decoration has been left in the natural color of the clay and surrounded by black glaze. This refined Athenian stands was used to hold water or wine. Valued as well for its beauty, this red-figure vessel (so-called because the figures have been left the natural color of the clay) portrays maenads, women participants in rites celebrating Dionysus, the god of wine. But unlike the frenzied and whirling figures of other Greek painters, there is calmness, even elegance, depicted here.
This tender serenity, coupled with a softer, somewhat freer form, is the stylistic hallmark of this artist and has been used to identify other works by him, principally similar stam noi with Dionysian scenes. The clay is plastic, tough, and, when well levitated, very smooth. It contains a high percentage of iron, and so fires pink. In modern Athenian potteries white clay is mixed with the red, and this may also have been the ancient practice.
The pots are thrown and turned on the wheel, except for the relatively few mounded and built ones. The smaller were thrown in one piece, the larger in sections. The sections were mostly made at the structural points, between neck and body, or body and foot, and to conceal them thin coils of clay were added on the outsides, whereas on the insides the joins are often visible. After the marks of the turning tools had been removed probably with scrapers and moist sponges as nowadays the handles were attached.
These were all separately made by hand, not molded. The nature of the black medium used in the decoration had long been a puzzle, and only recently has it been successfully analyzed and reproduced. It is not a glaze in the modern sense, for it contains insufficient alkali to render it fusible at a definite temperature. It is rather liquid clay, peptized, that is, with the heavier particles eliminated by means of a protective colloid. Since the clay out of which it was made contained iron, the color of the glaze changed from red to black or brown according to the nature of the firing.
After the decoration was completed and the vases had become bone dry, they were placed in the kiln and fired. The procedure was dictated by the nature of the glaze. It was a single fire, but had three successive stages at first oxidizing (with air admitted), then reducing (with smoke introduced), and lastly re oxidizing. In the first stage the body of the vase and the glaze turned red, in the second both became black (or gray), in the third the clay of the vase turned red again, being sufficiently porous to readmit the oxygen, whereas the denser glaze remained black. The initial wash (of diluted peptized clay) and the diluted glaze were also porous enough to re oxidize in the third stage of the firing, and so became reddish-brown; likewise the red accessory color, being red ochre plus peptized clay, re oxidized.
The white accessory color, being peptized white clay without, or with little, iron, was not affected by the reducing fire and remained white throughout. The chemical changes from red to black to red are in the oxidizing fire the carbon of the fuel combines with two atoms of oxygen to form carbon dioxide; in the reducing fire the carbon monoxide extracts oxygen from the ferric oxide present in the clay and converts it into black magnetic oxide of iron (or black ferrous oxide). Lastly a red ochre application was applied (apparently after firing) to intensify the red of the clay. In addition to black-figure and red-figure, all-black ware, without any figured decoration, was popular. The method of firing explains also the frequent red spots on what were intended to be black areas.
In a Wine Jar red and black glazes are contrasted in clearly defined areas. The red glaze must, therefore, have been intentional, not accidental. An explanation tentatively offered for this phenomenon is that vases were twice fired. For the first fire (successively oxidizing are reducing) only those parts were painted that were to come out black; and for the second fire (exclusively oxidizing) only those parts that were to come out red were painted. This theory would explain the fact that in all the vases so far examined the red goes over the black, showing that it was applied subsequently; also that the red glaze has often extensively peeled, as would be natural if it had been applied on fired clay; and that the extant examples in this technique are relatively few, a second firing being of course cumbersome. About 530 - 525 B.
C. a new technique is introduced, which is called red-figure. Now the figures are left the color of the clay (and hence turn red when the vase is fired); details are indicated either in a very fine line drawn in black glaze, which is slightly raised (and hence called a relief line), or in lines of varying thickness executed in diluted glaze, with a tonal range from dark brown to translucent yellow. The dilute glaze is also at times applied to limited areas as a solid wash. The entire background - the space between and around the figures - is now painted a lustrous black, as if the system of illumination had been reversed. - Most black-figure scenes look like sun-drenched open spaces in which figures are silhouetted, as if seen against the light. Red-figure, by contrast, reproduces the principles of modern theatrical lighting, with each performer bathed in his own spotlight.
The immediate benefit for the spectator is twofold: not only does the picture carry better over a greater distance, but the contour of the vase itself is also less eroded by the decoration: the black of the background merges with the portions of the vase that bear no figures. Thus the contour of the vase and its rotundity are reestablished, with the proper stress on the profile or silhouette of the vase. The path of black-figure from its powerful though unsophisticated beginnings in the late seventh century to its almost decadent daintiness a hundred years later is straight and clear. Red-figure in its initial phase seems brutally rustic by comparison, can hardly have been a serious challenge to the older, fully developed technique. In early works by the Andokides Painter, for instance, the heavy inner markings, not even consistently drawn in relief lines, is no match for the subtle incisions of, say, the late Exekias. All of this, however, changes rapidly and radically in the next generation, when a group of first-rate painters sets out to perfect the new technique.
This group, considered the pioneers, no longer translates black-figure scenes into red-figure, as the Andokides Painter had been prone to do; instead, the old subjects are treated in novel compositions, as if they had never been painted before, and new subjects are introduced with a surety as if they had a long tradition behind them. Painting red-figure pots The rough outline was drawn on the clay with charcoal: this normally disappeared when the pot was fired, but if the clay was soft an impression was sometimes left. The second stage was for the painter to go round the outside of the figure with a thin brush (approximately 5 mm wide) and paint a line to enclose the figure completely. This line can very often still be detected on the finished pot. It will be BLACK after the pot is fired.
Next comes the detailed drawing within the figures. On the finished pot this line is remarkably consistent in width, and usually "sticks up" in relief. We don't know how it was done - whether with a very fine brush or a special tool (like those used for icing cakes). The latest theory is that a series of tools with hairs attached could have been used - dipped in the clay paint and laid on to the pot to make curves, spirals or whatever. The relief line, drawn with "refined" clay will turn black after firing. The background was next filled in with a broad brush (the reason for the 5 mm line now becomes clear).
The "paint" is a refined version of the same clay from which the pot has been made, and so there is no great difference in color until the pot is fired. The FIRST phase of firing (lid open) would have fired both paint and unpainted clay to "red." When the kiln lid was closed, both paint and unpainted clay went black. The kiln was open again for the THIRD phase, and as it cooled the unpainted clay reverted to its red color. The painted parts, which had turned black, could not revert because of SINTERING. After firing, the pot was burnished (polished). All the "paint" - that is the background and the relief line - was changed to black, leaving the figure in the natural red of the clay.
The figured scenes were at first taken chiefly from mythology. The favorite deities were Zeus, Apollo, Athena, Hermes, and Dionysos with his retinue; the favorite heroes were Herakles, Theseus, and Perseus. A scene from the Trojan was, Amazons fighting Greeks, Centaurs, and Lapiths were popular representations. As time went on, however, artists became more and more interested in depicting the life around them the youths exercising in the gymnasium, riding, arming, departing for battle, fighting being wounded, dying; the banquets with men reclining on couches, drinking, singing, having their cups refilled by the boys, and listening to the music of the flute girls; women busy with their household tasks: fetching water, spinning, weaving, dressing, dancing, and attending to their children; children playing with their toys; household animals; rituals, marriage ceremonies, burials, and mourners at graves; actors performing in plays, both tragic and comic. All these subjects appear on the vases in a series of vivid scenes, and constitute one of the chief sources for our knowledge of Greek life. Ancient Civilizations Gallery Guide Greek Pottery and its Archaeological Importance web web Victor Bryant Ancient Greek Ceramics web web
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Research essay sample on Red Figure Ancient Greek
