Greek sanctuaries, may have acquired a new serpentine elegance in Greek hands, but they are still recognizably the
creatures introduced from the East at the end of the eighth century. These vessels, however, had encouraged Greek artists to
develop other types of cast attachment for vases and utensils, and although these too owe something to the foreigner, this
was a genre with greater possibilities.
A sculptural type, characterized by frontal features and wig-like hair, misleadingly called Daedalic by modern scholarship,
also derives from the East. With it was introduced the use of the mould for mass production of figurines and plaques,
another instrument inimical to change. Even so, it was a style which the Greeks exercised with imagination in different
media-usually clay, for figurines, plaques, or on vases, but also up to life-size in limestone, and in miniature in gold or ivory.
The third gift from the East, incising on silhouette figures, was practised on pottery (as it had not been in the East) as well
as on metal-work. Black-figure vases began to be made in Corinth in the seventh century, and at the end of the century the
technique was adopted in Athens. Other Greek studios followed their lead in the sixth century. There is something
uncompromising about silhouette, especially when executed in brilliant black gloss on a pale clay (buff in Corinth, orange
in Attica), and the incised line which reveals the clay through the black is crisp but generally unsubtle. Colour additions are
no more than dabs of white and red - real polychromy was for the early Archaic Island schools, and rare in black-figure,
being technically difficult, although artists brought up in areas where panel- or wall-painting (commoner than the scant
surviving examples would lead us to believe) was practised were bolder: for instance, the east-Greek painters who
emigrated to Etruria in the sixth century. The Eastern animal-frieze style too long obsessed the painter, but later some artists
were able to rise above the limitations of their technique and produce works whose quality of mass, line, and mood
anticipate the Classical. Here Athens leads.