Hunt Brothers Ancient Bronze Sculpture Coins Painted Vases Etruscan Roman Greek

Wealth of the Ancient World. The Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt Collections.
DESCRIPTION: Softcover: 329 pages. Publisher: Kimbell Art Museum in association with Summa Publications; (1984). This book offers an unparalleled opportunity to examine the art, attitudes and aspirations of classical antiquity — an age far removed from that of our own, but one that still impresses itself strongly upon ours, socially and culturally. The exhibition spans more than a thousand years, extending from the archaic period in Greece and Etruria through the rich style of Sicily and South Italy to the Hellenistic and Roman periods. This epoch witnessed the shift in power from Athens to Rome and the final triumph of the East with the establishment of the new capital in Constantinople. As the exhibition will demonstrate, the ancients converted even their most prosaic form of wealth – their coinage – into objects of great refinement and artistry. Of the 112 coins selected from the collection of Nelson Bunker Hunt – considered now one of the finest in private hands – many are notably for their rarity, condition or historical importance, but almost all exhibit qualities that distinguish them as works of art.
It is well-known that Greek vases are among the greatest artistic legacy of antiquity. Their decoration derives from everyday life as well as from the rich tradition of Greek drama and literature. The fifteen examples that comprise the collection of Nelson Bunker Hunt, all of which will be exhibited, include both black and red-figured pieces of Corinthian, Attic and South Italian workshops. Bronze enjoyed a great importance in antiquity as the primary medium for “pure” sculpture, though today we can also appreciate the imaginative decoration of utilitarian objects in bronze. Both aspects of bronze artistry are reflected in the thirty-eight pieces of the William Herbert Hunt Collection. Among them are acknowledged masterworks of portraiture and small statuary. At the first public showing of the majority of ancient works of art recently assembled by the Hunt brothers, this exhibition will demonstrate that the genius of classical art was not confined to monumental stone sculpture, but found eloquent and very refined expression in the labors of draftsmen, metalworkers and die engravers as well. Opportunities to see the arts of classical antiquity are unusual. Because of the many spectacular, rare, and in several cases, unique pieces included in the selection, this book made a major contribution to knowledge of the subject.
CONDITION: LIKE NEW. Virtually unread (but with very mild shelfwear to covers). Kimbell Art Museum (1983) 329 pages. Book appears virtually unread, perhaps the first 25 pages may have been flipped through. Pages are clean, crisp, unmarked, unmutilated, tightly bound, and “unread” in the sense that it is quite clear no one has ever “read through” the book. Of course it’s always possible that a few bookstore browsers may have flipped through the book while it was on the bookseller’s shelf – which is always a possibility with any book which traveled through normal retail distribution channels which would include traditional shelved (“brick and mortar”) book stores. In addition to that it’s also possible the original owner may have flipped through the book, perhaps looking at the illustrations. However there are no indications the book has ever been read other than the absolutely most faint indication, almost merely a suggestion, that someone may have flipped through the first 25 pages of the book. And that’s mostly based on the presumption that with the book being 40 years old…someone, somewhere, at some time must have flipped through it least the first few pages…even if there are no such indications. From the outside the covers do evidence very mild edge and corner shelfwear. Huge, heavy books like this are awkward to handle and so tend to show accelerated shelfwear, frequently dragged across book shelves and bumped into book shelf edges, as due to their size and weight they are frequently the victim of careless, lazy or clumsy re-shelving. In this instance there is a small (1 inch) half-formed crease, or crinkle to the upper open corner of the front cover. This is typically ca by someone trying to shelve the book between two adjacent books which are already tightly shelved. So the cover starts to bend. In this instance the book is withdrawn before the corner of the cover bent over and formed a crease. But if you hold the book up to a light source and inspect it carefully, you can see that at one point in time the corner of the book was “stressed” as it was tightly inserted between two adjacent books, leaving a very faint “wrinkle” or stress mark at the corner. It’s very common shelfwear found with oversized softcover books. There is also a similarly faint crinkle/crease along and parallel to the lower edge of the back cover, starting at the lower open corner, and extending about 1 1/2 inches. Looks like the cover edge was dragged across a bookshelf, and again, started to (but did not completely) fold over. Otherwise there is just some very faint rubbing and scuffing along cover edges and corners which we did our best to “touch up”. We describe the book as “like new” given the faint and superficial shelfwear, but frankly most book sellers would simply grade this as “new”. And indeed, except for the faint shelfwear to dustjacket and covers, the overall condition of the book is relatively consistent with what might pass as “new” stock from a traditional brick-and-mortar open-shelf book store (such as Barnes & Noble, Borders, or B. Dalton, for example) wherein patrons are permitted to browse open stock, and so otherwise “new” books often show a little handling/shelf/browsing wear, by and large simply from routine handling and the ordeal of constantly being shelved and re-shelved. Satisfaction unconditionally guaranteed. In stock, ready to ship. No disappointments, no excuses. PROMPT SHIPPING! HEAVILY PADDED, DAMAGE-FREE PACKAGING! Meticulous and accurate descriptions! Selling rare and out-of-print ancient history books on-line since 1997. We accept returns for any reason within 30 days! #068a.
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PLEASE SEE PUBLISHER, PROFESSIONAL, AND READER REVIEWS BELOW.
PUBLISHER REVIEW:
Large format. Art exhibited at the Kimball Art Museum; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; Detroit Institute of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; 1983.. A great art book covering ancient coins and antiquities owned by the infamous Hunt Brothers. This will remain to be a valuable reference on highly important coins and antiquities. The contents of this book include: The Vases of Nelson Bunker Hunt – The Bronzes of William Herbert Hunt – The Coins of Nelson Bunker Hunt – Notes for Coin Entries – Abbreviated Titles of References – Glossary – Maps – Appendices – and Indices. Many illustrations, with 16 in full color.
REVIEW:  Dietrich von Bothmer is chairman of the Department of Greek and Roman Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Alan L. Boegehold is professor of classics at Brown University.
REVIEW:  Classicist art historian and vase expert, Metropolitan Museum of Art Curator of Greek and Roman Art. Born to an aristocratic Hanover family, Bothmer worked as a youth for the German-Expressionist artist and sculptor Erich Heckel. His older brother, Bernard von Bothmer joined the Berliner museums in 1932 as an Egyptologist and the younger Bothmer decided on a museum career himself. He studied one year at the Friedrich Wilhelms Universität in Berlin before receiving a Cecil Rhodes Foundation grant to study in Oxford in 1938.
In Oxford he met J. D. Beazley with whom he would study. Bothmer received his diploma in 1939 in Classical Studies. He then made an extended visit to the United States, visiting museums and sending information on classical vases to Beazley, who later incorporated it into his subsequent monographs (“Attic Black-Figure Vase Painters”, 1956, and “Attic Red-Figure Vase Painters”, second edition, 1963). He studied at the University of California, Berkeley, 1940-1942, under the classicist and vase scholar H. R. W. Smith. Bothmer was a fellow at the University of Chicago for a year in 1942 before returning to Berkeley to complete his Ph.D. in 1944.
Anti-German sentiment running strong, Bothmer joined the U. S. army though not a citizen, and was assigned to the south Pacific theatre. There he was wounded in action–carrying a fellow soldier several miles through enemy lines–and awarded a Bronze Star and Purple Heart for heroic achievement and U. S. citizenship. He was demobilized in 1945. Bothmer’s brother, who had also come to the United States as curator in Brooklyn, introduced the young Bothmer to curators, among them Gisela Marie Augusta Richter, curator of Greek and Roman objects, who steered him into a postion in her department as a curatorial assistant.
Bothmer remained at the Metropolitan the rest of his career. He established himself in the social New York world, joining the soirées of art benefactor Josephine Porter Boardman Crane (1873-1972) among others. He eventually fell into disagreement with the notoriously anti-archaeologist Met director Francis Henry Taylor. In 1959 Bothmer advanced to Curator. The same year he was elected President of the American committee for the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, which he held until 1983. In this capacity, he author two fascicules in the CVA, one for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and another for the Metropolitan.
In 1965 he was appointed adjunct professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University and awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship the following year. He married the oil heiress (and widow of Marquis Jacques de la Bégassière) Joyce Blaffer (b. 1926), who began making significant donations to the Met. In 1990 Bothmer was awarded the Distinguished Research Curator position at the Metropolitan. The Met named the two principal galleries of Classical pottery the “Bothmer Gallery I” and “Bothmer Gallery II” (financed by his wife) in his honor in 1999. 
Over the course of his life, he was awarded honorary doctorates from the universities at Oxford, Trier and Emory, named a Chavalier de la Legion d’Honneur and a member of both the Académie française and the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (DAI). Bothmer’s brother, Bernard, was an Egyptologist/art historian at New York University. Bothmer’s career at the Metropolitan was often controversial. In 1967, the museum’s financial director, Joseph V. Noble and Bothmer announced that a famous bronze horse acquired in 1923 by the museum was a forgery based upon stylistic grounds and gamma ray testing.
The pair made a public announcement and removed the horse from view. However, Carl Bluemel doubted their stylistic findings as did the curator of Greek and Roman Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Cornelius Vermeule. When more sophisticated technical tests were later performed, the work was proven to be authentic. Bothmer was also acc that his eagerness to secure excellent pieces for the Museum resulted in rewarding unscrupulous dealers and thieves. In one celebrated case, Bothmer persuaded the museum in 1972 to purchase a single vase, a Greek krater decorated by Euphronios, for the (then) unheard of price of $1 million.
The Met sold much of its coin collection to pay for the acquisition, outraging museum professionals and archaeologists alike. The murky provenance of the vase led many archaeologists to believe it had recently been illegally excavated from an Italian archaeological site, likely Cerveteri. Though Bothmer and Metropolitan Director Thomas Hoving insisted the pot had lain in pieces in a family collection in Beirut, Hoving later admitted in 1993 that the evidence sited for the Beirut collection was never part of the Met’s Euphronios krater. The krater was repatriated in 2006.
REVIEW:  Dietrich Felix von Bothmer (1918–2009) was a German-born American art historian, who spent six decades as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he developed into the world’s leading specialist in the field of ancient Greek vases. Von Bothmer was born in Eisenach, Germany on October 26, 1918. An ardent opponent of the Nazi dictatorship, von Bothmer attended Berlin’s Friedrich Wilhelms University and then went to Wadham College, Oxford in 1938 on the final Rhodes Scholarship awarded in Germany. There he worked with Sir John Beazley on his books Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters and Attic Black-Figure Vase-Painters, working collaboratively to group works by identifying the individual craftsmen and workshops that had created each of hundreds of Greek vases. He graduated in 1939 with a major in classical archaeology. 
A tour of museums in the United States in 1939 left von Bothmer stuck there with the start of World War II. Due to his strong anti-Nazi sentiments, he ref to return to Germany, and narrowly escaped being sent back to Germany against his will. He earned his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley in 1944. Though not yet a citizen, in 1943 he volunteered for the United States Army. After 90 days in the U.S. Army, he was sworn in as a U.S. citizen in March, 1944. He served in the Pacific theater of operations, earning a Bronze Star Medal and Purple Heart for a conspicuous act of bravery on August 11, 1944, while serving in the South Pacific, where, despite being wounded himself in the thigh, foot, and arm, he recovered a wounded comrade and carried him back three miles through enemy lines.
  Following the completion of his military service, he was hired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1946, and was named as a curator in 1959. By 1973, he was department chairman and he was named in 1990 as distinguished research curator. In 1972, together with the Director, Thomas Hoving, von Bothmer argued in favor of the purchase of the Euphronios krater, a vase to mix wine with water that dated from the sixth century B.C. They convinced the museum’s board to purchase the artifact for $1 million, which the museum funded through the sale of its coin collection. The Government of Italy demanded the object’s return, citing claims that the vase had been taken illegally from an ancient Etruscan site near Rome. The krater was one of 20 pieces that the museum sent back to Italy in 2008 in exchange for multi-year loans of ancient artifacts that were put on display at the Met, as part of an agreement reached in 2006.
Von Bothmer’s 1977 exhibit “Thracian Treasures from Bulgaria” covered twenty centuries of Thracian culture, with more than 500 art works dating back to the Copper Age. The 1979 show “Greek Art of the Aegean Islands” included 191 pieces, of which 46 came from the Met and a similar number from the Louvre. The remainder came from several different museums in Greece, including the largest known Cycladic sculpture, dating to 2700 to 2300 B.C., on loan from the National Archaeological Museum, Athens. A 1985 exhibition based on his research, “The Amasis Painter and his World: Vase Painting in Sixth Century B.C. Athens,” included 65 works of a single artist who created his pottery 2,500 years before, the first to document the history of the work of a single craftsman from that ancient period as a one-man show.
Von Bothmer’s numerous published works in the field include the 1957 “Amazons in Greek Art”, “Ancient Art From New York Private Collections” and “An Inquiry Into the Forgery of the Etruscan Terracotta Warriors in the Metropolitan Museum of Art” (with Joseph V. Noble), both published in 1961, “Greek Vase Painting: an Introduction” in 1972, his 1985 book “The Amasis Painter and His World: Vase-Painting in Sixth-Century B.C. Athens”, his 1991 book “Glories of the Past: Ancient Art from the Shelby White and Leon Levy Collection”, and in 1992,”Euphronios, peintre: Actes de la journee d’etude organisee par l’Ecole du Louvre et le Departement des antiquites grecques, etrusques de l’Ecole du Louvre”. He also contributed in 1983 to “Wealth of the Ancient World (Hunt Art Collections”, to “Development of the Attic Black-Figure” Revised edition (Sather Classical Lectures)” in 1986, and a wide variety of other publications. He took a faculty position in 1965 at the Institute of Fine Arts, the nation’s top-ranked graduate program in art history, according to the National Research Council’s 1994 study.
Von Bothmer was the recipient of numerous awards and citations, including a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur; a member of the Académie française (one of only two Americans to have this honor); an honorary fellow of Wadham College; and several honorary doctorates. Complementing his career as a curator and an academic, he served on the Art Advisory Council of the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR). A resident of both the Manhattan district of New York City and Oyster Bay, New York, von Bothmer died at age 90 on October 19, 2009, in Manhattan. His brother was the renowned Egyptologist Bernard V. Bothmer, who died in 1993.
PROFESSIONAL REVIEW:
A magnificent collection of ancient art. Renowned not only for their manipulation of the silver market, the Hunt Brothers also amassed a collection of rare ancient art. This is a documentary of the art, principally bronze statuary of both Greek and Roman origin, Greek vases, and exceptionally rare Greek and Roman coins. Many of these specimens are very rare, and not to be found described or imaged except within this catalog. Richly illustrated coupled with a scholarly and enriching narrative. Certainly a “don’t miss it”.
READER REVIEW:
The Hunt Brothers (of infamy) gained fame throughout the numismatic world for the collection of exceptionally rare and exceptionally fine ancient Roman and Greek coins. The serious aficionado of ancient coins will not be disappointed here, as the entire collection is displayed. The Hunt Brothers’ Collection was perhaps less renowned for their collection of equally rare Attic and Corinthian vases; and their Graeco-Roman bronzes. This unique book, in large scale (“coffee table sized”, if you will), presents these rare artifacts in both picture and description, and is quite frankly, thrilling. The catalog is difficult to find, but well worth the effort. It is only on rare occasion you find such an accumulation of ancient art work in a single catalog. Well written, sumptuous photos, certainly a “ten”.
ADDITIONAL BACKGROUND:
Ancient Greek Pottery: Pottery is virtually indestructible. Though it may break into smaller pieces (called shreds), these would have to be manually ground into dust in order to be removed from the archaeological record. As such, there is an abundance of material for study, and this is exceptionally useful for modern scholars. In addition to being an excellent tool for dating, pottery enables researchers to locate ancient sites, reconstruct the nature of a site, and point to evidence of trade between groups of people. Moreover, individual pots and their painted decoration can be studied in detail to answer questions about religion, daily life, and society.
Made of terracotta (fired clay), ancient Greek pots and cups, or “vases” as they are normally called, were fashioned into a variety of shapes and sizes, and very often a vessel’s form correlates with its intended function. For example, the krater was to mix water and wine during a Greek symposion (an all-male drinking party). It allows an individual to pour liquids into its wide opening, stir the contents in its deep bowl, and easily access the mixture with a separate ladle or small jug. Or, the vase known as a hydria was for collecting, carrying, and pouring water. It features a bulbous body, a pinched spout, and three handles (two at the sides for holding and one stretched along the back for tilting and pouring).
In order to discuss the different zones of vessels, specialists have adopted terms that relate to the parts of the body. The opening of the pot is called the mouth; the stem is referred to as the neck; the slope from the neck to the body is called the shoulder; and the base is known as the foot). On the exterior, Greek vases exhibit painted compositions that often reflect the style of a certain period. For example, the vessels created during the Geometric Period (circa 900-700 B.C.) feature geometric patterns, as seen on the famous Dipylon amphora (below), while those decorated in the Orientalizing Period (circa 700-600 B.C.) display animal processions and Near Eastern motifs.
Later, during the Archaic and Classical Periods (circa 600-323 B.C.), vase-paintings primarily display human and mythological activities. These figural scenes can vary widely, from daily life events (e.g., fetching water at the fountain house) to heroic deeds and Homeric tales (e.g., Theseus and the bull, Odysseus and the Sirens), from the world of the gods (e.g., Zeus abducting Ganymede) to theatrical performances and athletic competitions (for example, the Oresteia, chariot racing). While it is important to stress that such painted scenes should not be thought of as photographs that document reality, they can still aid in reconstructing the lives and beliefs of the ancient Greeks.
To produce the characteristic red and black colors found on vases, Greek craftsmen liquid clay as paint (termed “slip”) and perfected a complicated three-stage firing process. Not only did the pots have to be stacked in the kiln in a specific manner, but the conditions inside had to be precise. First, the temperature was stoked to about 800° centigrade and vents allowed for an oxidizing environment. At this point, the entire vase turned red in color. Next, by sealing the vents and increasing temperature to around 900-950° centigrade, everything turned black and the areas painted with the slip vitrified (transformed into a glassy substance). Finally, in the last stage, the vents were reopened and oxidizing conditions returned inside the kiln.
At this point, the unpainted zones of the vessel became red again while the vitrified slip (the painted areas) retained a glossy black hue. Through the introduction and removal of oxygen in the kiln and, simultaneously, the increase and decrease in temperature, the slip transformed into a glossy black color. Briefly, ancient Greek vases display several painting techniques, and these are often period specific. During the Geometric and Orientalizing periods (900-600 B.C.), painters employed compasses to trace perfect circles and silhouette and outline methods to delineate shapes and figures.
Around 625-600 B.C., Athens adopted the black-figure technique (i.e., dark-colored figures on a light background with incised detail). Originating in Corinth almost a century earlier, black-figure uses the silhouette manner in conjunction with added color and incision. Incision involves the removal of slip with a sharp instrument, and perhaps its most masterful application can be found on an amphora by Exekias. Often described as Achilles and Ajax playing a game, the seated warriors lean towards the center of the scene and are clothed in garments that feature intricate incised patterning. In addition to displaying more realistically defined figures, black-figure painters took care to differentiate gender with color: women were painted with added white, men remained black.
The red-figure technique was invented in Athens around 525-520 BCE and is the inverse of black-figure. Here light-colored figures are set against a dark background. Using added color and a brush to paint in details, red-figure painters watered down or thickened the slip in order to create different effects. Watered down slip or “dilute glaze” has the appearance of a wash and was for hair, fur, and anatomy, as exemplified by the sketchy coat of the hare and the youth’s musculature on the interior of this cup by Gorgos. When thickened, the slip was to form so-called “relief lines” or lines raised prominently from the surface, and these were often employed to outline forms. Surprisingly similar to red-figure is the white-ground technique.
Though visually quite different with its polychrome figures on a white-washed background, white-ground requires the craftsman to paint in the details of forms just like red-figure, rather than incise them. Alongside figures and objects, one can sometimes find inscriptions. These identify mythological figures, beautiful men or women contemporaneous with the painter (“kalos” / “kale” inscriptions), and even the painter or potter himself (“egrapsen” / “epoiesen”). Inscriptions, however, are not always helpful. Mimicking the appearance of meaningful text, “nonsense inscriptions” deceive the illiterate viewer by arranging the Greek letters in an incoherent fashion.
The overall attractive quality of Greek vases, their relatively small size, and—at one point in time—their easily obtainable nature, led them to be highly coveted collector’s items during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Since the later part of the nineteenth century, however, the study of vases became a scholarly pursuit and their decoration was the obsession of connoisseurs gifted with the ability to recognize and attribute the hands of individual painters. The most well-known vase connoisseur of the twentieth century, a researcher concerned with attribution, typology, and chronology, was Sir John Davidson Beazley.
Interested in Athenian black-, red-figure, and white-ground techniques, Beazley did not favor beautifully painted specimens; he was impartial and studied pieces of varying quality with equal attention. From his tedious and exhaustive examinations, he compiled well-over 1000 painters and groups, and he attributed over 30,000 vases. Although some researchers since Beazley’s death continue to attribute and examine the style of specific painters or groups, vase scholars today also question the technical production of vessels, their archaeological contexts, their local and foreign distribution, and their iconography. [KhanAcademy.org].
Experts tend to speak of ‘Greek Vases’ and ‘Greek vase-painting’, rather than pottery or ceramics. This terminology has been in use for a long time and reflects the material’s long, and indisputably close, relation with the history of art. The scholarship of Greek Vases developed from the early 18th century, when large numbers of examples began to be discovered in Italy.
Broad classifications for Greek pottery are the same as for any other: place, time, shape, technique and decoration. Most has been found in graves. Domestic contexts are uncommon because sites were re; it takes a volcano such as Vesuvius to preserve life as it was lived. Sanctuary contexts are known, but they too are not numerous. Knowing where the pottery was found does not necessarily confirm the function. For example, some found in graves was made for funerals, but some was initially made for another purpose, , sometimes even mended, and buried with the dead, presumably as a cherished possession.
The focus of this article is the fine wheel-made pottery, fired at relatively high temperatures, and decorated in a variety of ways, but vast quantities of coarse and undecorated ancient Greek pottery are known today, and this material is not without importance. Most of the people who made the finer pottery probably also made other products of clay, such as sarcophagi, roof tiles, small altars, terracotta figurines, and plaques. The one place and period where there was more specialized production of finer figure-decorated pottery is Athens in the later 6th and 5th centuries.
The pottery made in Greece between about 1000 and 300 B.C. has been preserved in large quantities. Most examples come from graves discovered not only in Greece, but also in many parts of the Mediterranean region, particularly in Italy, where pottery was exported in large quantities in antiquity. The ‘fine’ pottery with figure decoration, especially that made in Athens between about 625 and 300 B.C., is of great importance to archaeologists and historians because shapes and styles of decoration can be dated closely, often to within twenty years of manufacture.
The ability of scholars to recognize individual painters who lived more than 2500 years ago, in the absence of signatures and contemporary literary documentation, has made the study of Greek figure-decorated pottery a subject in the History of Art. The connoisseurship of Greek, particularly Athenian, vases is a model of excellence, combining close personal examination of the objects with rigorous documentation of shapes, techniques, and styles of decoration.
Greek Pottery was made by Greek-speaking people. A significant number lived outside the area recognized today as Greece. There is, for example, a wealth of material from the coastal settlements of modern Turkey, and some of its off shore islands, particularly of the 6th century. Greek-style pottery was also made in the western Mediterranean, for example, in southern Italy and Sicily, from the end of the 5th century. Interaction between Greeks and non-Greeks affected the shapes, techniques, and decoration of Greek Pottery.
Greek painted pottery has a long history. Conventionally the earliest examples are dated around 1000 B.C., the latest around 300 B.C. The tradition can be traced back, to Bronze Age (Cretan and Mycenaean) ceramics, and carried on through later Hellenistic, but both of these groups are sufficiently different from the main sequence that they tend to be studied separately. What holds the main sequence together? The answer is political, social, and economic history, as much as knowledge of potting and painting handed down through generations. Conventionally the finer pottery of these 700 years is divided into groups, by centuries or half, even quarter, centuries, according to styles and techniques of decoration.
Because the pottery can be dated closely, often to within 20 or 25 years, through absolute and relative dates, there is a tendency to use it to date other types of objects, found both in Greece and in lands where Greeks traveled, traded and settled. There is also a tendency to use terms adopted for styles of pottery decoration to denote periods of time. For example, people often speak of ‘Geometric Greece’, but this terminology is not precise and should be avoided; ‘Geometric Athens’ is not the same chronologically as ‘Geometric Corinth’.
Good handbooks present Greek Pottery in chronological order, with sub-sections devoted to regions. Only Athens figures prominently as a centre of production in all periods, and it is for this reason that Athenian is in the following brief introduction to major styles and techniques. In the Protogeometric and Geometric styles the technique is usually no more than dark paint on a light ground. ‘Orientalizing’ is the name given to the next style, produced in a variety of techniques, under growing eastern influence from about 700 B.C. Some Greeks, among them the Athenians, outlined their figures on pottery, as they might have painted them on walls.
Others, initially the Corinthians, incised detail on the silhouette of figures with a sharp tool, as they might have chased decoration on metal. For a century or more, depending on where they lived, Greeks developed city-states, some under powerful tyrants, and gained access to more eastern ‘luxury’ goods. From small, portable objects, for example, of metal or animal bone/tusk, they took common decorative motifs and adapted them to their own needs. Enjoyment of eastern luxuries was, however, restricted from the mid-6th century, after which the Persians began to conquer Greek settlements in the east, and even to threaten Greeks at home.
Although never as artistically celebrated as Athens nor as militarily renowned as Sparta, the city-state of Corinth was nevertheless a major player in the renaissance of Greece during the first millennium B.C., contributing particularly to the development of visual arts which reached its zenith in the 5th century B.C. Her favorable geographical location – situated on the Isthmus between the Peloponnese and Attica, with easy access to the Adriatic in the west and the Aegean in the east – and peculiar ability to prosper supported a checkered history from Neolithic times right through to and beyond the sack of Corinth by the Romans in 146 B.C.
Map of CornthareaPausanias’ account of his visit to Corinth in the 2nd century AD records the variety of myths long associated with the area – the Sow of Krommyon slain by Theseus, the brigand Sinis who tore his victims apart between two flexed pine trees, the foundation of the Isthmian Games by Sisyphus – as well as the many ancient buildings still standing, from the archaic Temple of Apollo to the Springs of Peirene, from the rich Agora to the Sanctuary of Aphrodite. Strabo’s term for these relics of the earlier city, ‘Necrocorinthia’, was by Humfrey Payne as the title for his important 1933 book on Corinthian pottery.
From the 8th century B.C., many other local settlements were attracted by the rich coastal plain, the numerous springs, the ports of Lechaion and Kenchriai, and the steep acropolis of Acrocorinth affording protection, with the result that Corinth was in a position to expand, establishing colonies overseas, most notably on Corfu and Sicily, and to pursue greater foreign trade. The first modern archaeological excavation was undertaken by the Germans in 1886. From 1896 systematic excavations were continued by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.
Some Late Bronze Age Mycenaean and early Iron Age Protogeometric pottery has been discovered, but it is the later Geometric style that is well represented. Corinthian vases made in the first half of the 8th century B.C. have been found at the nearby sanctuary of Perachora and Delphi further along the Corinthian Gulf, at Aetos on Corfu, and throughout Sicily and South Italy, providing archaeologists with evidence for Corinthian exploration of sea routes and for the dating of sites.
In the late 8th century, when the Geometric style was coming to an end, Corinthian contact with the Near East was a stimulus for the Orientalizing style of Greek pottery. Evidence from excavation of the ‘potters’ quarter’, one mile west of Corinth, would seem to support this resurgent interest in painted wares. The traditionally angular geometric patterns were being replaced with the curvaceous flora and fauna that typify the Protocorinthian style. For much of the 7th and 6th centuries Corinth led the Greek world in producing and exporting pottery.
When Attic wares superseded Corinthian in the mid-6th century, Corinth had left a significant legacy of artistic developments, not only in pottery, but also in architecture, which had thrived under the powerful, aristocratic, Bacchiad family, as Herodotus describes. A monarchy was established by Kypselos in 657, whose successor, Periander, may have been responsible for constructing the stone track (diolkos) by which ships were dragged across the Isthmus. Many wars throughout the ensuing centuries eroded Corinth’s resources, and the city fell to Philip of Macedon in 338. Her participation with the Achaean Confederacy in the Second Macedonian War eventually led to her sack in 146, but Corinth was refounded as a Roman colony. By the time Paul had established an early Christian church there in the late 1st century AD, Corinth was once

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