Gardners Art through the Ages A Global History

Geometric Art

Also during the eighth centuryBCE, the human figure returned to

Greek art—not in monumental statuary, which was exceedingly rare

even in Bronze Age Greece, but in small bronze figurines and in

paintings on ceramic pots.

DIPYLON KRATER One of the earliest examples of Greek fig-

ure painting is a huge krater (FIG. 5-2) that marked the grave of a

man buried around 740BCEin the Dipylon cemetery of Athens. At

well over three feet tall, this vase is a considerable technical achieve-

ment and a testament both to the potter’s skill and to the wealth and

position of the deceased’s family in the community. The bottom of

the great vessel is open, perhaps to permit visitors to the grave to

pour libations in honor of the dead, perhaps simply to provide a

drain for rainwater, or both.

The artist covered much of the krater’s surface with precisely

painted abstract angular motifs in horizontal bands. Especially

prominent is the meander,or key, pattern around the rim of

the krater. Most early Greek painters decorated vases exclusively

with abstract motifs. The nature of the ornament has led art his-

torians to designate this formative period of Greek art as Geometric.

The earliest examples of the Geometric style date to the ninth cen-

turyBCE.

On this krater, the artist reserved the widest part of the vase for

two bands of human figures and horse-drawn chariots rather than

for geometric ornament. Befitting the vase’s function as a grave

marker, the scenes depict the mourning for a man laid out on his

bier and the grand chariot procession in his honor. The painter filled

every empty surface with circles and M-shaped designs, negating

any sense that the mourners or soldiers inhabit open space. The hu-

man figures, animals, and furniture are as two-dimensional as the

geometric shapes elsewhere on the vessel. For example, in the upper

band, the shroud, raised to reveal the corpse, is an abstract checker-

board-like backdrop. The figures are silhouettes constructed of tri-

angular (frontal) torsos with attached profile arms, legs, and heads

(with a single large frontal eye in the center), following the age-old

convention. To distinguish male from female, the painter added a

penis growing out of one of the deceased’s thighs. The mourning

women, who tear their hair out in grief, have breasts emerging be-

neath their armpits. In both cases the artist’s concern was specifying

gender, not anatomical accuracy. Below, the warriors look like walk-

ing shields, and in the old conceptual manner, both wheels of the

chariots are shown. The horses have the correct number of heads

and legs but seem to share a common body, so that there is no sense

of overlapping or depth. Despite the highly stylized and conven-

tional manner of representation, this vessel marks a significant turn-

ing point in the history of Greek art. Not only was the human figure

reintroduced into the painter’s repertoire, but the art of storytelling

also was revived.

HERAKLES AND NESSOSOne of the most impressive sur-

viving Geometric sculptures is a characteristically small solid-cast

bronze group (FIG. 5-3) made up of two schematic figures locked in

a hand-to-hand struggle. The man is a hero, probably Herakles (see

“Herakles,” page 120). His opponent is a centaur (a mythological

beast that was part man, part horse), possibly Nessos, the centaur

who had volunteered to carry the hero’s bride across a river and then

assaulted her. Whether or not the hero is Herakles and the centaur is

Nessos, the mythological nature of the group is certain. The reper-

toire of the Geometric artist was not limited to scenes inspired by

daily life (and death). Composite monsters were enormously popu-

lar in the ancient Near East and Egypt, and renewed contact with

foreign cultures may have inspired the human-animal monsters of

Geometric Greece. The centaur, however, is a purely Greek inven-

tion—and one that posed a problem for the artist, who, of course,

had never seen such a creature. The Geometric artist conceived the

centaur as a man in front and a horse in back, a rather unhappy and

unconvincing configuration that results in the forelegs belonging to

a different species from the hind legs. In this example, the sculptor

rendered the figure of the hero and the human part of the centaur in

a similar fashion. Both are bearded and wear helmets, but (contra-

dictory to nature) the man is larger than the horse, probably to sug-

gest that he will be the victor. Like other Geometric male figures,

both painted and sculpted, this hero is nude, in contrast to the Near

Eastern statuettes that might have inspired the Greek works. Here, at

the very beginning of Greek figural art, one can recognize the Hel-

lenic instinct for the natural beauty of the human figure. In fact,

Greek athletes exercised without their clothes and even competed

nude in the Olympic Games from very early times.

102 Chapter 5 ANCIENT GREECE

5-2Geometric krater, from the Dipylon cemetery, Athens, Greece,

ca. 740 bce. 3  41 – 2 high. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Figure painting reappeared in Greece in the Geometric period, named

for the abstract ornamentation on vessels like this krater, which features

a mourning scene and procession in honor of the deceased.

1 ft.

5-2A DIPYLON
PAINTER,
amphora with
mourning
scene,
ca. 750 BCE.