Chapter VI

.). It covers the period from 1500 to about 900 B.C., and it is to this time that we may attribute the general use of the potter’s wheel in Greece, although it was known even earlier, as some isolated specimens prove.

Among the Greeks there were many contending claims for the honour of having invented the potter’s wheel. Tradition attributed it to various personages, such as Daedalos,[751] or his nephew and rival Talos[752]; Hyperbios of Corinth[753]; Koroibos of Athens; and Anacharsis the Scythian.[754] Kritias, the comic poet, claimed the invention for Athens—“that city which ... invented pottery, the famous offspring of the wheel, of earth, and of fire.”[755] There is also a familiar allusion to it in Homer,[756] which is a fair testimony to its antiquity:—

“Full lightly, as when some potter sitteth and maketh assay Of the wheel to his hands well-fitted, to know if it runneth true.”

As regards the traditions, even Strabo[757] realised their absurdity, when he asked, “How could the wheel be the invention of Anacharsis, when his predecessor Homer knew of it?” On the other hand, Poseidonios adheres to the tradition, maintaining that the passage in Homer is an interpolation.[758] Other allusions to the wheel are in the writings of Plato[759] and the comic poet Antiphanes.[760]

[Illustration: FIG. 65. POTTER’S WHEEL (FROM A PAINTING OF ABOUT 600 B.C.).]

Among the Egyptians and Greeks the wheel took the form of a low circular table, turned with the hand, not as nowadays with the foot.[761] The assumption that the wheel was turned with the foot is only supported by one passage in the Book of Ecclesiasticus[762]; the evidence of Plutarch[763] and Hippokrates[764] tells decidedly against it. In 1840 some discs of terracotta, strengthened with spokes and a leaden tire, came to light on the site of the ancient potteries at Arezzo, and these had evidently been used as potter’s wheels.[765] The process is also represented on two or three vases, as on a Corinthian painted tablet of about 600 B.C. (Fig. 65),[766] on a kylix in the British Museum (B 433), on a B.F. hydria in Munich (Fig. 67 _b_, below), and on a R.F. fragment from the Acropolis of Athens (Fig. 66),[767] which shows a man modelling the foot of a large krater, while a boy or slave turns the wheel, as on the Munich vase. On the British Museum cup the potter is seated on a low stool, apparently modelling a vase which he has just turned into shape on the wheel.

[Illustration: FIG. 66. POTTER’S WHEEL (FROM A VASE OF ABOUT 500 B.C.).]

In making the vases the wheel was used in the following manner:—A piece of paste of the required size was placed upon it vertically in the centre, and while it revolved was formed with the finger and thumb, the potter paying regard not only to the production of the right shape, but to the necessary thickness of the walls. This process sufficed for the smaller pieces, such as cups or jugs; the larger amphorae and hydriae required the introduction of the arm. The feet, necks, mouths, and handles were separately turned on moulds, and fixed on while the clay was moist. They are often modelled with great beauty and precision, especially the feet, which are admirably finished off, to effect which the vase must have been inverted. The modelling and separate attachment of the handle is represented in more than one ancient work of art (see Fig. 66). In many cases the joining of the handles is so excellent that it is easier to break than to detach them. Great technical skill was displayed in turning certain peculiar forms of vases, and generally speaking the Greeks with their simple wheel effected wonders, producing shapes still unrivalled for beauty.

In the case of the earlier vases, which are made by hand, after the clay was properly kneaded the potter took up a mass of the paste, and hollowing it into the shape of walls with one hand, placed the other inside it and pressed it out into the required form. In this way also the thickness of the walls could be regulated. When raised or incised ornaments were required, he used modeller’s tools, such as wooden or bronze chisels. The largest and coarsest vases of the Greeks were made with the hand, and the large πίθοι, or casks, such as have been recently found in such numbers in Crete and Thera (p. 152), were modelled by the aid of a kind of hooped mould (κάνναβος): see _ibid._). The smaller and finer vases, however, were invariably turned on the wheel. On a Graeco-Roman lamp from Pozzuoli, in the British Museum,[768] a potter is seen standing and modelling a vase before his furnace, in the manner no doubt employed at all periods.

Certain parts of the ancient painted vases were modelled by the potter from the earliest times—_e.g._ on those of the Geometrical period horses are occasionally found on the covers of the flat dishes moulded in full relief, and in other examples the handle is enriched with the moulded figure of a serpent twining round it. This kind of ornament is more suitable to works in metal than in clay, and suggests the idea that such vases were, in fact, imitations of metallic ones. On vases of all periods moulded bosses and heads, like the reliefs on metal vases, are sometimes found; even in black-figured vases the insertions of the handles of hydriae and oinochoae are occasionally thus enriched. In the later styles modelling was more profusely employed; small projecting heads were affixed to the handles of jugs[769] at their tops and bases, and on the large kraters found in Apulia the discs in which the handles terminated (see above, p. 171) were ornamented with heads of the Gorgon Medusa, or with such subjects as Satyrs and Maenads. These portions were sometimes covered with the black varnish used for the body of the vase, but frequently they were painted with white and red colours of the opaque kind.

A peculiar kind of modelling was used for the gilded portions of reliefs, introduced over the black varnish. When the vase was baked a fine clay was applied to the parts intended for gilding and delicately modelled, either with a small tool or a brush, a process similar to that adopted in the Roman red ware (_en barbotine_, see