Ancient Greek Vase Painting

Ancient Greek Vase Painting

Because of its relative durability, pottery comprises a large part of the archaeological record of Ancient Greece, and since there is so much of it (some 100,000 vases are recorded in the Corpus vasorum antiquorum), it has exerted a disproportionately large influence on our understanding of Greek society. Little survives, for example, of ancient Greek painting except for what is found on the earthenware in everyday use, so we must trace the development of Greek art through its vestiges on a derivative art form. Nevertheless the shards of pots discarded or buried in the first millennium BC are still the best guide we have to the customary life and mind of the ancient Greeks.

Read more about Ancient Greek Vase Painting:  Inscriptions, Rediscovery and Scholarship, Uses and Types of Ancient Greek Pottery

Famous quotes containing the words ancient, greek, vase and/or painting:

    Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
    The worlds revolve like ancient women
    Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
    —T.S. (Thomas Stearns)

    Make room, Roman writers, make room for Greek writers; something greater than the Iliad is born.
    Propertius Sextus (c. 50–16 B.C.)

    Forgotten and stinking they stick in the can.
    And the vase breath’s better and all, and all.
    And so for the end of our life to a man,
    Just over, just over and all.
    Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)

    If people only knew as much about painting as I do, they would never buy my pictures.
    Edwin Landseer (1802–1873)