Over 100,000 Greek painted vases survive, while nearly all Greek paintings vanished
From the Iron Age to Rome's 146 BC victory at Corinth, Greek makers chased idealized yet lifelike bodies, especially nude male figures. Pottery and coins survive in huge numbers—over 100,000 fairly complete painted vessels—while paintings and wooden objects mostly vanished.
Scholars usually leave Neolithic and Bronze Age Aegean work out of ancient Greek art, then split the rest into Geometric, Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic phases. The Geometric begins around 1000 BC, the Classical around 500 BC just before the Persian Wars, and the Hellenistic with Alexander's reign of 336 to 323 BC. Real change was uneven: regions moved at different speeds, and local cult requirements are distinctive enough that historians can trace an exported piece to its home.
Early pots carried abstract patterns. Around 750 BC the Dipylon Master and his contemporaries began squeezing stylised silhouettes of people and horses into dense decoration, often funerals or battles. In the late eighth century an Orientalizing wave imported sphinxes, lions, lotus and palmette motifs from the Near East. Black-figure and red-figure painting, near mirror images of each other, peaked roughly 600 to 350 BC; white-ground allowed freer drawing but wore badly and was made mostly for burial.
Pottery was cheap enough for ordinary households: a piece with five or six painted figures might cost two or three days' wages. Some perfume flasks hid a false bottom just below the neck so that a little scent looked like a full bottle. Scholars increasingly suspect much production was meant for graves, a budget substitute for metal. Painters rarely signed, so hundreds are known by nicknames such as the Achilles Painter or the Berlin Painter.
Corinth and Athens eventually swamped local workshops, exporting as far as Spain and Ukraine; so many turned up in Italy that eighteenth-century collectors called them Etruscan vases. By the fifth century BC pot painting had become an industry rather than a leading art. Meanwhile temples kept their stone shells but lost most decoration, large bronzes are rare, and Roman marble copies fill many gaps in Greek sculpture.
Source: Ancient Greek art
