GREEK POTTERY The pottery of ancient Greece, prehistoric and historical, is distinguished from all other fictile wares of the same ages by its free' development of naturalistic painted decoration. The ceramic painter's art was so far separated from the potter's in the classical period, that each could put his signature to his own portion of the work, and there can be little doubt that the best Minoan pot tery was equally the joint product of the two craftsmen. This uniformity in Prehellenic and Hellenic ceramics can hardly be fortuitous. Though Late Minoan (Mycenaean) vase-painting contains no visible element of design that was adopted by the Geometric artists, the technique of potter and painter passed intact across the apparent gap in culture that separates the Aegean ages of Bronze and Iron, and the subsequent revival of naturalistic ornament in the Archaic Greek period shows that something more than mere mechanical skill had been inherited.
The technique in which the master pieces of classical vase-painting were executed was first perfected in Minoan Crete, but its invention was not Cretan. Painted pot tery was made in prehistoric Mesopotamia and Egypt long before its appearance in Aegean lands. Pre-Sumerian ware bears decora tion fired on pale clay in a dark medium of ferruginous earth fused with an alkaline flux, and one variety of Egyptian pre dynastic pottery has dull white pigment similarly fired on a dark ferruginous wash. Both processes were applied in Early Minoan pottery; the latter was brilliantly exploited in the polychrome Middle Minoan style (Kamares ware), but the former finally prevailed, because of its greater freedom, in the Late Minoan age. (See ARCHAEOLOGY; Crete.) At the close of the M.M. period, when Cretan arts were transplanted to the Greek mainland, the colonial (Mycenaean) fabric of Minoan pottery displaced the inferior and largely hand-made native wares, Helladic, Cycladic and Thessalian, which formerly marked the various cultural regions. (See ARCHAEOLOGY; Greece.) By the end of the My cenaean age the pottery of the whole Aegean area was uniform, except on its northern and eastern borders, where Danubian and Anatolian influences were preponderant. This latest Mycenaean ware preserves the forms and fabric of the best Minoan models, but its ornament is atrophied. Shells, octopods and seaweed have degenerated into rows of wavy lines, lily and papyrus flowers appear as groups of parallel curves or chevrons, and the rich designs of linked and running spirals give way to bands of single coils. But the clay is finely worked, the pots accurately turned, the firing hard and even, the glaze dense and lustrous. Two Mycenaean fabrics can certainly be distinguished. The more numerous class has a warm yellow clay surface and its black glaze fires red. The smaller group is made of exceedingly smooth pale greenish clay, and painted with brown-fired glaze, which tends to flake away from the close texture of the surface. The latter
belongs to the Argolid, and was made from the same white clay that produced the later Protocorinthian and Corinthian wares.
The next historical phase in Greece was the transition from bronze to iron, about I000 B.C., a cul tural change that involved the violent downfall of the Mycenaean polity. Arts were generally submerged, but the pottery can be identified. It is called Submycenaean or Protogeometric, as its elements appear to attach themselves to the old Minoan or the new Hellenic system. The technique is still Minoan and is often brilliant, but many of the pot-shapes are modified and the dec orative patterns assume a new character. The surviving My cenaean motives are resolved into their simplest linear elements, and these tend to combine again in rigid geometric schemes. Another tendency was to abandon painted patterns and cover the whole pot with black glaze. In this potent fallow the new principles of Hellenic art were laid, and the so-called Geo metric style sprang rapid and luxuriant. In its mature phase a Geometric vase is covered with narrow horizontal bands of minute and crowded ornament, rows of repeated figures, triangles, loz enges, circles, continuous or panelled bands of zigzags, chequers and, chiefly characteristic, the maeander. This last motive, always drawn in double outline filled with hatching, is probably the key to the origin of the style. It appears at the same period in Italy, in the pottery and bronze work of the Villanova culture, and since there is no evidence of intercourse between the two countries at this date, must have been introduced into both from a common northern source. Its first occurrence in Greece is in isolated bands or panels reserved on necks or bodies of black glazed pots, a rudimentary form of decoration which was as uni versal as the former Mycenaean style. Subsequent developments were local, and many styles have been identified in mainland Greece, the Aegean islands and the coast of Asia Minor. The most elaborate is that of Athens, called Dipylon ware after the cemetery at the city-gate, where the largest vases have been found. These are huge sepulchral jars which sometimes bear among the geometric patterns broader bands or longer panels filled with pictures of funerals, a corpse surrounded by mourners, and processions of chariots, human and animal figures being drawn schematically in black silhouette. These subjects are the first expression of Hellenic delight in representation, which quickly dominated decorative art and ultimately destroyed it. The live subject, human and animal, was also utilized in the Geometric style as a decorative unit, in bands of soldiers carrying shields and spears, of grazing horses, deer and goats, running dogs and birds. The birds belong, like the maeander, to primary sources of the style, but the grazing and running quadrupeds are a later feature, and are probably the first signs of oriental influence.