Stout and Slender in the Late Archaic Period

In his work Potter and Painter in Ancient Athens Sir John Beazley proposes a more detailed study of the shapes of vases in order to obtain a better knowledge of the relations between potters and painters. By this article, written in honour of his sixty-sixth birthday, I hope to contribute to the discussion of the problem.It is well known that the development of Greek vase-shapes follows a regular course, from heavy and plump forms to slender and more elegant ones. The illustrations in Richter and Milne, Shapes and Names of Athenian Vases, will confirm this opinion, and Miss G. Richter maintained it lately in her Attic Red-figured Vases 1946, 18. The chronology of vases of the fourth century B.C. depends mainly upon this development (Buschor, FR III, 152; Schefold, Untersuchungen zu den Kertscher Vasen, passim), R. Zahn calls it a rule (FR III, 204), and W. Technau used this rule as a firm starting-point when dealing with the chronology of the works of Exekias.Old rules tend to lose their efficacy if they are not periodically endowed with new vigour, and thus enabled to keep their activity throughout the next stage of development. In the field of Attic vase-shapes one of the most decisive renewals of this kind took place about 510 B.C. at the time of the fall of the tyranny and the institution of the Kleisthenic democracy. A new impetus revealed itself not only in the invention of new shapes, such as the stamnos, the pelike, and the kalpis (Beazley, ABS 24), but also in the modification of long-established forms.