A Fine Figure

Dominic Green visits Princeton University Art Museum to see the current exhibition of exquisite Ancient Greek red-figure vases, largely the work of the so-called Berlin Painter, whose particular style was identified by the Oxford scholar Sir John Beazley in 1911.

- Dominic Green

‘It is well known,’ wrote Ernst Gombrich in The Image and the Eye, 1982, ‘that it is to Greek art that we must look for the conquest of appearances.’ This mastery, as Gombrich had argued in his earlier book, Art and Illusion, 1977, derived from the innovative function of art within Greek civilisation – a function whose difference from Egyptian precedent Gombrich described as the ‘Greek revolution’.

Egyptian civilisation, Gombrich believed, wanted an art of totems, showing timeless events peopled by eternal presences. This hieratic style of art needed ‘stereotyped’ images, without the foreshortened perspectives of artistic realism or ‘narrative illustration’. Whereas the Greeks of the Archaic Period (from circa 800 BC prior to the Persian invasion of 480 BC) required a ‘narrative’ art, in images as well as literature – an art in which appearances are fleeting fragments of a larger story.

The narrative artist and the poet sought to capture passing moments, not eternal truths. The infant Herakles bunches his hands to kill the snakes that writhe in his cradle. The athlete stiffens his sinews as he prepares to launch the discus. Artemis walks forward, one hand raising the fringe of her chiton so that she does not trip, the other tipping an oinochoe, a wine jug. The dancer, the wrestler and the warrior recoiling from a spear tip are twisted in a balance at once equal and unsustainable.