In the early 4th century an attempt was made to revive this dull field again with colours, white generally for flesh of one or two figures in a group, blue, green, red and gold for drapery and jewels. Gold was often laid on details modelled in relief. These vases have been largely found in North Africa and South Russia, and take their name from the Crimean town of Kertch. They represent the last phase of pictorial painted pottery in Greece. The art survived, however, and even flourished for at least another hundred years in South Italy, where it was first established at the end of the 5th century. Another Attic fabric, the white-slipped ware which was regularly used for funeral lekythoi and occasionally for kylikes and other shapes in black-figure and outline-drawing, also came to a natural end in the 4th century, but was not involved in the same artistic decadence, since its decoration had proceeded on the broader lines of painting. These little vases, oil-bottles made for offerings to the dead, generally bear pictures of the tomb with boys and maidens bringing gifts. Clothes and mourning-sashes are painted in bright colours, and free brush-work dominates the designs. But painted patterns did not entirely disappear with pictorial subjects.
There was always a large class of black-glazed vases which had no other painting, but were sometimes fluted or impressed with slight ornaments in close imitation of metal. These were further adorned in the 4th and 3rd centuries with wreaths and necklaces drawn or engraved, or modelled and painted white or gilt, and occasionally with moulded figures like bronze plaques in relief. This style seems to have been universal in Hellenistic Greece, and was also produced extensively in Apulia and Campania (Gnathia and Capua wares). Another Hellenistic fabric, usually black-glazed, has purely plastic decora tion, being exactly copied or even cast from contemporary bronze and silver vessels ornamented with reliefs. One group of bowls
is called, for no good reason, Megarian or Homeric; it may be the Samian ware mentioned by Pliny, and is certainly the proto type of the Roman pottery wrongly called by that name. Bowls have decorative foliate patterns, or bear mythological and heroic scenes, often accompanied by written descriptions or verses quoted from the plays or poems which they illustrate. Another type, called Calene phiale, and mostly made in Italy, is a shallow bowl with a central medallion or interior border-frieze in relief. Two examples in the British Museum, with a frieze of chariots, are replicas of a silver bowl in the same collection. (See SILVERSMITHS' AND GOLDSMITHS' WORK.) Some Hellenistic wares preserved the old tradition of black painted ornament on a light clay ground or slip. Their designs are mostly wreaths and garlands, and their fabrics seem to be located in the East, par ticularly at Alexandria in Egypt (Hadra vases). Alexandria and Tarsus were the first centres of manufacture of Greek pottery glazed in modern fashion. Blue and green faience was the speciality of Egyptian potteries. It had been imitated by the archaic Greeks and appears with Greek designs again in the Hellenistic age. But the new glaze is quite different, and was prob ably an Asiatic invention. It is a thick vitreous substance made with a metallic flux, in colours ranging from brown through yellow and green to blue, and was usually laid over lamps and similar small vessels moulded in relief or entirely modelled in natural forms. But at this point Greek plastic pottery finally merges with Italian. The art of the Mediterranean world in the and century B.C. was Hellenistic, industry was cosmopolitan, and it is not always possible to know in which country the fabrics were located.