The Medici Conspiracy by Peter Watson

“classical.” The Kleophrades Painter (fl. c. 505–c. 475 BC) is named after the potter Kleophrades, son of (the black-figure painter) Amasis, whose signature appears on a large red-figure cup now in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. In this period, scenes are lightened in style, with playful borders, and there are fewer figures. It was also about now that cup painters begin to be distinguished from pot painters. Cup, or kylix, painting was perhaps the most intimate of all forms, given the vessel’s use in symposia. The great cup painters were Onesimos, Douris (who produced 280 vases, signing forty), and the Brygos Painter.
    Toward the end of the fifth century BC, vase painting underwent yet another change, in that there arose a predilection for new compositions and certain mythological subjects. Scholars now think this was as a response to a great efflorescence of wall painting in Athens, which has been lost. This is thus an added reason for the importance of vase painting of this late period. A favorite subject was the battle between the Athenians and the Amazons, a mythical precursor of the more recent victory of the Athenians over the Persians. In this new stylistic period, the human body is shown in very varied, but very loose poses; there is much more foreshortening and drapery folds lose their rigidity, to both conceal and yet reveal the body beneath. (Much the same was happening in sculpture.)
    Following the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War in 404 BC, Athens lost its market in the West. This marks the point when local vase painting began to flourish elsewhere. Apulian and Gnathian painting (Gnathia was a town in Apulia, in southern Italy) became briefly fashionable. By the end of the fourth century BC, however, red-figure vase production came to an end in all parts of the ancient world.
    Pottery is the most important material for the study of antiquity because it was produced in great quantities over several centuries and survives in abundance.
    Paintings on vases tell us more about the Greeks, what they looked like, what they did, and what they believed in, than any single literary text. Thus even a vase with poor drawing often times takes on a special significance because of a story told for the first time, or a detail illuminated.
. . . In this context the average does not take away from the best; rather, like the broad base of a pyramid, it directs the gaze to its summit and supports it.
    This tribute to the “poorly drawn and average” vase was written by none other than Dietrich von Bothmer.

    Among the first connoisseurs to amass a major collection of vases was Sir William Hamilton. A member of the Society of Antiquaries, he was appointed the British plenipotentiary at the court in Naples, where he formed not one but two collections of Greek and Etruscan ceramics. The first collection, which consisted of 730 objects, was sold to the British Museum in 1772 for £8,400. His second collection was even finer than the first, consisting of vases recently excavated—and he sent it to England to be sold. Part was lost at sea, but the remainder reached London and was auctioned. This auction did much to influence taste in England, one man who fell under the spell being Joshua Wedgwood. He developed a modern version of Greek and Italian vases (at his plant called “Etruria”) that became so fashionable that at times they sold for three times as much as the real thing. Hamilton’s main rival in Italy was the Frenchman Vivant Denon, later to be instrumental in the creation of the Musée Napoleon, now the Louvre. His collection of Greek and Etruscan vases comprised 520 pieces. A tourist guide published in 1775 listed forty-two collections with vases around Europe, in eighteen cities.
    The revival of interest in ancient Greece—stimulated by the excavations south of Naples and Winckelmann’s writings—was one of the main factors giving rise to the