ABSTRACT

The pottery described in the preceding chapters is characterized by its painted decoration. At the same time there was also much pottery of compa­ rable quality which was simply covered with the standard dark paint. Such pottery has little artistic merit till near the middle of the sixth century, when Attic workshops were refining their standards of shape, paint and finish. For the next century and a half the new Attic Black-painted ware (or, as it is often miscalled, Black-glazed ware) is often technically and aesthetically excellent. There follows a steady fall in quality, but not in output. Meanwhile the less exacting requirements of black-painted pottery had encouraged local imitations in many, if not most, Greek cities and in Etruria. But the Attic product, because of its better clay or tradition, was still exported widely, even in the Hellenistic period, though by the mid­ fourth century it had lost its Western markets to black-painted Campanian and to Gnathian. At last, apparently in the middle of the second century, a needed revolution began. The native peoples of parts of nearer Asia had been used to pottery with a red surface, and perhaps for that reason as much as technical convenience some potters of the Hellenistic East chose to fire their paint to an even, slightly shiny red. This kind of red-painted pottery is generically and imprecisely classed as Sigillata, of which the Hellenistic version is- or used to be -particularized as 'Pergamene', and there is also a newer term - Red-gloss ware. Though Red wares became normal in Greek Asia by the end of the second century, a degenerate black­ painted ware persisted at Athens and perhaps in the rest of European Greece till at least the beginning of the first century BC and in Italy about its end. Italian Sigillata, of which Arretine is the principal representative, began in the third quarter of that century, and its universal success justified imita­ tion throughout the Roman empire. During the next two centuries, which were the heyday of Sigillata, the manufacture of Early Roman wares spread as far as Syria and Britain. The later Sigillata of the eastern or Greek half of the ancient world, the so-called Late Roman wares, prolonged their decline from the second to the seventh or eighth century AD when a true glaze was at last adopted generally. So the last flicker of the tradition of Greek vase-painting was snuffed out.