Silhouette first, then the scratch
The painter worked on the unfired pot. With a slip, clay thinned into a liquid, he painted the figures and the ornament as flat shapes; everything else was left the colour of the clay. At this stage the scene was a set of shadows. Then came the detail: with a sharp point he scratched lines through the painted areas, so that each one showed the clay underneath as a thin pale line. Muscles, eyes, the edge of a shield, the pattern of a cloak, all were drawn this way. It is the same principle as scraperboard, where you scratch a dark surface to make a light drawing.
For colour the painter had two extras, white and purple, mixtures of pigment and clay laid over the black. Then the firing did the rest. In three stages, with air let in, cut off and let in again, the kiln turned the whole pot first orange, then black, then orange once more everywhere except under the glossy slip, which stayed black. The picture appeared only at the end.
From Corinth to Athens
The silhouette style was invented in Corinth, the great pottery centre of the seventh century BCE, where painters filled their vases with friezes of animals. Athenian workshops learned the technique and took it further, with larger figures and whole stories, and during the Archaic period the market followed them: by 550 BCE Athenian black-figure pottery dominated the export trade across the Mediterranean.
The François Vase: a library on one pot
How much can you fit on one vase? Around 570 BCE the potter Ergotimos and the painter Kleitias answered with a large krater that carries 270 figures and 131 inscriptions, most of them names written next to the figures, like the captions of a comic strip. The bands run from the lip to the foot and tell, among other stories, the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, the funeral games for Patroclus and the hunt for the Calydonian boar. Both men signed it, “Kleitias painted me” and “Ergotimos made me”.
It never stayed in Athens. Etruscan aristocrats of Chiusi bought it around 565 BCE and buried it in a tomb, where Alessandro François found it in 1844-45; it has carried his name ever since.
Exekias: the master of the technique
A generation later, Exekias brought black-figure to its peak, and he signed as both potter and painter. His most famous work, an amphora now in the Vatican (540-530 BCE), shows Achilles and Ajax in armour, seated and bent over a board game during a pause in the Trojan War. Letters come out of their mouths like speech bubbles as they call their scores: four for Achilles, three for Ajax. No such scene appears in Homer, and the calm of the game sits on top of what the viewer knew was coming, the death of both heroes at Troy.
In the Metropolitan Museum a neck-amphora by Exekias (about 540 BCE) survives complete with its lid, a rarity. On each side a bearded man and a woman ride in a chariot, while a young musician walks behind the horses playing the kithara. The patterns on their clothes are all incised, and the figures sit at exactly the right height on the curve of the pot, where they suffer no distortion.
Why did red-figure take over?
Around 530 BCE, quite possibly in the workshop of the potter Andokides, painters reversed the scheme: they left the figures in clay colour and painted the background black. The change looks small, yet it gave the painter a brush instead of a point. Inside a red figure, lines could be drawn with fine strokes or diluted washes of slip, which suited anatomy, garments and emotions far better than scratched lines. Red-figure replaced black-figure gradually, as painters saw what drawing with a brush allowed.
Was black-figure, then, a clumsy first draft? Look at the Exekias amphora again before answering. Its painters accepted a strict rule, a dark shape and a scratched line, and within that rule they produced some of the most carefully composed images in Greek art.
Where to see it
The François Vase is in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Florence, and Exekias’s Achilles and Ajax amphora in Room XIX of the Museo Gregoriano Etrusco in the Vatican Museums. The Metropolitan Museum in New York has Exekias’s lidded amphora and works by the Amasis Painter in its Greek galleries. Check opening times on the museums’ websites before you go.
Sources
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Department of Greek and Roman Art, “Athenian Vase Painting: Black- and Red-Figure Techniques” (2002); C. Hemingway and S. Hemingway, “Greek Art in the Archaic Period” (2003), Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection records 17.230.14a, b; 63.11.6; 31.11.10.
- Musei Vaticani, “Anfora attica a figure nere firmata da Exekias”, Museo Gregoriano Etrusco, Sala XIX (inv. 16757).
- Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Firenze and Catalogo generale dei Beni Culturali, “Vaso François” (scheda 0900514760).
