The main patterns at a glance
Learn these six and you will recognise almost every border in a Greek gallery:
- Meander or Greek key: one continuous line that turns at right angles and doubles back, named after the winding river Maeander in Asia Minor.
- Wave: a running scroll of rounded curls, the curved cousin of the meander.
- Palmette: a fan of leaves spreading from a small base, like the top of a palm.
- Lotus: a stylised flower, often alternating with palmettes in a chain.
- Rosette: a round flower seen from above, with four, eight or more petals.
- Acanthus: the leaf of the acanthus plant, the signature of the Corinthian capital.
Put a palmette and a lotus together in a repeating band, or let palmettes crown the top of a stone, and you have an anthemion (from the Greek anthos, flower), a flowery ornament that Greek carvers used for centuries.
Straight lines first: the Geometric meander
The oldest of the set is the meander. In the Geometric period, between about 900 and 700 BCE, Athenian potters divided their vases into horizontal bands and filled them with straight-line ornament, and the meander became one of the favourites: it fills a band evenly and can be stretched to any length, like a paper chain.
Then the flowers: palmettes and lotus from the East
In the seventh century BCE Greek traders settled in stations on the Levantine coast and in the Nile Delta, and eastern motifs entered Greek art: palmette and lotus compositions, animal hunts and composite beasts such as the griffin. The plant patterns stayed for good. By the sixth century they ran along the borders of painted dresses: the Peplos Kore from the Acropolis of Athens, carved around 530 BCE, wore a peplos whose borders carried a double band of spirals, plant motifs and a chain of volutes and palmettes alternating with lotus flowers, with rosettes on a green ground in the middle.
Patterns on clothes are no exception. Vase paintings show that Greek garments were brightly coloured and covered in designs, and the Greek key and the wave are the motifs that later designers most often borrowed to make a dress look classical.
Patterns in stone: columns and grave markers
Architecture used the same vocabulary. The Ionic capital places its two volutes on top of a band of palm-leaf ornaments. On the column from the Temple of Artemis at Sardis, now in the Metropolitan Museum, the space between the volutes is filled with palmettes and rosettes. The Corinthian capital goes further: a bell-shaped core decorated with acanthus leaves, spirals and palmettes, with small volutes at each corner, so it looks the same from every side.
Grave markers made the patterns personal. On the stele of Kallidemos, son of Kalliades, carved in Athens around 350-325 BCE, the crowning akroterion (from akros, topmost) is a double palmette flanked by two half palmettes, rising from spiral tendrils set in a bed of acanthus leaves, with bell-like flowers hanging from the volutes. Down the shaft run double rosettes with eight petals each. The name of the dead man is carved just below the moulding, inside a frame of flowers.
Did the patterns mean something?
Probably less than many modern explanations claim. Some motifs carried a memory of their origin, the meander of a river, the palmette of a palm, the lotus of a flower, but the Greeks used them above all as borders: to frame a picture, to mark the parts of a vase or a garment, to crown a monument. That is why the same motif appears on a wine cup, a dress and a tombstone. Their success lies in their usefulness: a band of meander or palmettes can be stretched, shortened or turned round a corner without losing its rhythm.
Where to see them
The Metropolitan Museum in New York has the Geometric krater, the Kallidemos stele and the Sardis column in its Greek and Roman galleries. In Athens, the Acropolis Museum shows the painted korai with their borders, and the National Archaeological Museum has the great Geometric vases. Check opening times before you go.
Sources
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: “Greek Art in the Archaic Period” (2003); “Architecture in Ancient Greece” (2003); H. Koda, “The Greek Key and Divine Attributes in Modern Dress” (2003).
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection records 14.130.14, 26.59.1, 25.78.30.
- Acropolis Museum, Athens, “Statue of a Kore. The ‘Peplos Kore'” (Acr. 679).
- Strabo, Geography 12.8.15 (Perseus Digital Library).
