After the palaces, a world of circles and lines
At the end of the thirteenth century BCE the Mycenaean palaces of mainland Greece were destroyed, and with them their workshops. The centuries that followed were long called the Dark Age, a label historians now use with caution. Pottery is what survives best, and it shows a new taste taking shape.
First came the Protogeometric style (about 1050-900 BCE), with its concentric circles and half-circles. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, painters drew them with a compass fitted with several brushes, so a whole set of rings went down in one turn of the pot. In the Geometric period proper (about 900-700 BCE) the circles gave way to straight lines, and the whole surface of the pot was divided into horizontal bands. Specialists split the period into Early, Middle and Late Geometric, each with its own subphases: the krater shown below belongs to Late Geometric I.
What does a Geometric pot look like?
Picture a pot wrapped in ribbons. Each band carries one motif, repeated all the way round, and the favourite is the meander, a line that turns back on itself at right angles (the name comes from the Maeander, a river in Asia Minor famous for its bends).
The same order rules the vases themselves and their shapes. A terracotta pyxis (a round box with a lid) in the Met, made around 800-760 BCE, has a lid handle shaped as a tiny copy of the pyxis itself, a small joke in a very disciplined style. What the Geometric period lacks is large sculpture in stone: that would only come in the seventh century.
Why so many horses?
Because a horse meant money. Owning horses was a mark of the aristocracy, the families who could feed an animal that did not plough. So the small bronze horses of the eighth century are, in practice, status in miniature. They were found in great numbers in sanctuaries, where they had been left as gifts to the gods.
Some are masterpieces of the style. A horse in the Met (eighth century BCE), probably made in Corinth, is solid-cast, that is, poured in bronze in one piece with no hollow core, and stands 17.6 cm high, about the length of a pencil. Another Met horse, 10 cm high (750-725 BCE), stands on a decorated base plate, a detail typical of the later eighth century.
The first Greek stories are funerals
Around the middle of the eighth century BCE, in Athens, figures appear inside the bands. The most famous case is the Dipylon amphora (755-750 BCE), named after the cemetery by the Dipylon gate where it was found. It is 1.60 metres tall, about the height of a person, and it stood on the grave of a woman as her monument. Its bottom has a hole, so the liquid offerings (libations) poured into it ran down into the earth, towards the dead. The painter, known as the Dipylon Painter, put one scene in it: the prothesis, the laying out of the body on a bier, with mourners raising their arms around it.
Why paint a funeral on a funeral vase? Because the vase was part of the funeral. The Greek ritual had three moments: the prothesis, the ekphora (the procession to the grave) and the burial. The first was the moment when the family and the community gathered around the body, and it is the one the Dipylon Painter chose. A krater in the Met (about 750-735 BCE, 108.3 cm high), painted in the Hirschfeld Workshop, shows a man on his bier among his household and the mourners.
The figures are built from the same geometry as the ornament, so they read more like signs than portraits, a little like the figures on a road sign.
From pattern to picture
In the seventh century the bands fill with new guests: lotus flowers, palmettes, animal hunts and griffins, motifs that came from the Near East with trade. Corinthian potters invented a style of figures painted in silhouette, and Athens took it further, adding incised details. By 550 BCE Athenian black-figure painting dominated the export market across the Mediterranean.
So why so many lines and horses? Lines were what Greek craftsmen worked with in a century without large sculpture, and horses were the wealth of the families who paid them. When the Athenians wanted to show a funeral, they built it out of the same lines, and Greek storytelling in pictures starts there, on a grave.
Where to see it
The Dipylon amphora is in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. The Metropolitan Museum in New York has the Hirschfeld krater, the pyxis and several bronze horses in its Greek galleries. Check the museums‘ websites for opening times and closed rooms before you go.
Sources
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Geometric Art in Ancient Greece”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (2004); “Greek Art in the Archaic Period” (2003); “Death, Burial, and the Afterlife in Ancient Greece”; “Mycenaean Civilization”.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection records 14.130.14 (krater), 48.11.5a,b (pyxis), 21.88.24 and 69.61.2 (bronze horses).
- Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, Odysseus: Dipylon amphora (National Archaeological Museum 804).
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Pottery: Early Iron Age” and “Dark Age”.
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