ABSTRACT
Though ancient sherds are always turning up and the rarer complete pots are likely to be preserved, if only for re-use, they were for long ignored. The Middle Ages have left few records, but Arretine relief ware is mentioned from the late thirteenth century on. Ristoro d'Arezzo in his della Composizione del Mondo of 1282 wrote that artists supposed its maker divine or the fragments fallen from heaven. Giovanni Villani who died in 1348 also thought it superhuman in his Cronaca Fiorentina, and in the mid-fifteenth century Giorgio Vasari (according to his grandson, the biographer of painters) succeeded in imitating it. Giulio Romano in 1524 possessed an ancient cup of terracotta and M. Negri in 1557 in his Commentarium Geographicum mentioned pottery from Adria, but neither said anything of decoration. A few pieces, no doubt, could be found in the cabinets of the time, as for instance the painted vases of Cardinal Carpi, praised for their garlands by U. Aldroandi in L. Mauro's Antichita della Citta di Roma of 1558, and there were the black-figure pots found about 1565 in a chamber tomb at Orbetello by a Spanish engineer who was building fortifications there for Philip II. But such specimens were hardly noticed, and Thomas Dempster, a Scots papist who read and remembered everything, did not include vase-painting in the ceramic accomplishments of the paragons of his encyclopaedic and uncritical panegyric de Etruria Regali, compiled while he was professor of Law at Padua from 1616 to 1619. Avid though they were for other kinds of antiques, it is clear that writers and collectors, at least till the middle of the seventeenth century, had generally no interest in ancient painted pottery and, since it was avail able and its material not despised, this must have been from some stylistic repugnance. What that repugnance was may by elimination be inferred. After the end of antiquity, though technical standards had sunk, formulas survived for oblique views of faces and modelling by shading, so that to inquisitive painters of the late Middle Ages and still more so of the Renaissance the drawing of figures on the Greek pots commonly found in central Italy would have appeared primitive. For the same reason the earliest known facsimiles of Greek red-figure vase-painting mostly correct their originals by supplying heavy shading. These facsimiles - now at Windsor Castle or lent to the British Museum - are part of a large collection of drawings procured in the mid-seventeenth century by Cassiano dal Pozzo (or perhaps his brother) and reproduce a dozen Attic and South Italian figured pots accurately enough to allow the identification of their schools and in some instances of their painters. About the same time the French sculptor F. Girardon who studied in Rome around 1650, possessed two examples of South Italian red-figure; and it was perhaps through him that C. A. du Fresnoy, in his versified de Arte Graphica of 1668, listed vases among the examples of ancient art to be noticed. The next honour, that of first publishing an ancient vase (to be distinguished from an urn, which at that time meant a cinerary casket) belongs, it seems, to M. A. de la Chausse (or Causeus), a French resident in Rome and the author of the Romanum Museum. In this enlightened folio, which first came out in 1690, there are tolerable drawings with commentaries of a Calene phiale and of an Attic black-figure pelike (on sale again in Rome in the 1930s). A few years later, probably in 1701, L. Beger produced the third volume of the Thesaurus Regius et Electoralis Brandenburgensis: among the items, most of which had recently been bought from the estate of G. P. Bellori in Rome and were soon after traded from Berlin to Dresden for a regiment of dragoons, there are illustrated one piece of Attic and one of South Italian red-figure as well as an Italocorinthian alabastron. In another context and so un noticed for more than a hundred years was the publication of a Panathenaic amphora from Benghazi, which Lemaitre, French consul at Tripoli, contributed toP. Lucas's second Voyage of 1712. In 1719 and 1724 B. de Montfau on, in his l'Antiquite Expliquee, added several red-figure pots, mostly bought in Naples, but was as much interested in shape and use as in decoration. Then from 1723 to 1726 F. Buonarroti inserted in Dempster's work, at last being published, drawings of over thirty vases and appended a long disquisition about them.
