The Black-Figure Vase: Ancient Greece, Archaic Period

The Greek Vases are the one of the most eminent art creations during the beginning of the 6th centuries and the end of the 4th centuries, the gallery of early European art / ancient Greece & Rome art from the museum, the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, have included and introduced several red and black figure vases from Greek. The one that appeals to me from a multitude of art pieces is the “Neck Amphora, 575-550 BCE, Black-figure terra cotta”, which was the vase created by the Castellani Painter in Greece, Archaic period. The vase not only shows the how great the technique that Greek ceramists have, the decorative paintings and images on the sides of the vase also have the symbolic or representative meaning in their life,
Greece, ca. 625-600 BCE.” and the “Neck Amphora, 575-550 BCE ”, according to the “Fred S. Kleiner, Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, Western Perspective”, “ By the mid-sixth century BCE, the Athenian, having learned the black-figure technique from the Corinthians, had taken over the export market for fine painted ceramics.” The "Castellani Painter" inherited the skill of the black- figure vase painting invented by the Corinthians, and his “Neck Amphora” was the one of the great outcomes in that period. The comparisons will be discussed in the followings. First of all, both verses are two handled jar and have identical shape, the “Neck Amphora” is about 14 inches high, and the “Corinthian black-figure amphora” is 1’ 2”inch. They both show many series of registers, animals were included such as lion. However the “Corinthian amphora” has more types of creatures than “Neck Amphora”. Besides that, it has the “siren”, half bird and half woman mythical creatures, which we don’t see on the “Neck Amphora”. In addition, even thought they shared the same Greek ceramists and vase painting techniques, there still have differences between the two. First, the appearance of the “Corinthian amphora” is darker than the “Neck Amphora”, which was covered with more vegetal images in the spaces between images if the creatures, on the other hand, the “Neck Amphora” turned out to the cleaner, with more blank spaces. There was a most important evolving feature between the two, the “Corinthian amphora” from the earlier period are more geometric design, the characters are more stiffness. However, moved to the “Neck Amphora” there is tends to be more naturalistic in the details, such as the facial expression and the posture of the human and animals. Furthermore, rather than having images continuously repeat around the vase, Athenians often have two different scenes on the opposite side to show different