Here is a thing worth knowing about ancient Greek pottery. People used it. They drank from it, stored wine and olive oil in it, carried it across rooms at parties. The images painted on the outside, gods, athletes, lovers, battles, satyrs doing unspeakable things, were not museum pieces from the start. They were the visual environment of everyday life, spinning slowly in someone’s hands while the wine went around. This is what gets lost when we encounter these objects behind glass. They were made to be touched.
The painters who decorated these vessels were working on a curved surface for an audience that would be moving. A figure painted on a kylix, a wide, shallow drinking cup, would appear and disappear as the cup tilted toward a mouth, then was set back down. The painter knew this. The composition was designed for it. You were meant to catch glimpses, to turn the thing in your hands, to find the scene assembling itself as you looked.
Euphronios, one of the most celebrated painters of the late sixth century, signed his work. So did others. These were not anonymous craftsmen churning out functional objects. They were artists with reputations, competing for commissions, proud enough of what they made to put their names on it. When Euphronios painted the death of Sarpedon on a calyx-krater around 515 BCE, the body of the fallen hero lifted by Sleep and Death, rendered with a tenderness and anatomical precision that still stops people cold in their steps, he was doing something he knew was extraordinary. The pot knew it too, somehow.
The subjects they chose tell you everything about what mattered in that world. These included athletic contests and mythological pursuits, usually involving someone fleeing and someone giving chase. Dionysus was constantly portrayed, surrounded by his unruly entourage. Scenes from the symposium itself were also common, which meant that the party appeared on the vessels used at the party, a kind of cheerful recursion, life reflecting itself back in fired clay.
Then there is the erotic imagery, which is frank in a way that still catches modern viewers off guard. This isn’t because it is graphic, exactly, but because it is so matter-of-fact. Desire, on these pots, is just part of the picture. It sits alongside the gods and the athletes and the grapevines without apology or special emphasis. The Greeks did not think it required either.
What is strangest, standing in front of one of these objects in a museum, is the sensation of almost reaching someone. The painter’s hand moved across this surface two and a half thousand years ago, making decisions, this line here, that figure slightly smaller to fit the composition, and the decisions are still visible. The pot survived a civilization. It outlasted the language spoken around it, the city that produced it, everyone who ever drank from it, yet it is still, unmistakably, the record of a person who was good at something and knew it.
About the Author
Morgan Avery Mucha is a junior year art history student specializing in Ancient Greek art, with a focus on visual culture and material/ religious practice. She can read and write Ancient (Attic) Greek and has written for her academic blog, Art Abloom, for three years, engaging with classical art, archaeology, and historical interpretation.
Read more on the Honors Blog.
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