Robert Egert

Attic Lekythos

Lekythoi were used when burying unmarried warriors. Oil was used in the burial ceremony (was the body weas annointed with oil?). Many of these funerary leythoi feature images of the deceased with a woman standing separated by a grave stone. This piece still has the red garment worn by the warrior's mother along with her hair and faint outlines of her face. She appears to be pouring oil from a lekythos in the painting. So this is a somewhat self-referential piece that reminds one of post-modern motifs. There are traces of paint showing the warrior and the funeral stele but they are mostly gone. There's not enough painting left to attribute this to any individual artist in Athens, but this is apparently typical of the white-ground style. The paint is just sitting on the surface and has not been fused via a kiln baking process so it is very fragile. It only has survived as long as it has because it was probably buried in a grave. This white-ground lekythos has lost much of the painted detail. Even so, it has enough to suggest a beautiful painting and an evocotive subject.

Abstract

The white-ground painting method consists of a white slip of the local calcareous clay applied to a terracota vase and then painted. In the later development of the technique, a coloured wash was often applied to the clothing or flesh of the figures depicted. The earliest incidence of the technique was used to create strobing bands of colour that emphasize the shape of the vase (as on Nearchos, NY Met 1926,26.49), the use of a white ground in conjunction with outline painting did not develop until ca. 520 and is associated with the workshops of Andokides, Nikosthenes and Psiax.

By the Classical period white ground can be identified most closely with three principle shapes: lekythoi, cups and kraters. That the emergence of this form of painting can be explained as emulation of the more prestigious medium of wall painting has been conjectured but not demonstrated.

The White Ground Technique of vase painting flourished between the late 6th century BCE until the end of the fifth century in Athens and Etruria. The earliest surviving example of the technique is a fragmentary kantharos of ca. 570 BC signed by the potter-painter Nearchos, and found on the Athenian Acropolis (Akropolis 611).