Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum.

Vickers, Michael

The guidelines for the compilation of volumes in the CVA series enjoin a certain restraint on the part of their authors. They lay down quite clearly that what is required in the text is a bare description, dimensions and the minimum of comment. Dyfri Williams' new volume, which deals with some Athenian pottery drinking cups in the British Museum, provides the now customary illustrations and drawings to an extremely high standard: the profile drawings demonstrate with admirable clarity the skeuomorphic details of junction rings and grooves, while the photographs have been expertly taken in order to avoid flares from the metallic sheen of the vessels. These records are invaluable to any scholar wishing to make sense of the material.

But Dr Williams offers more than a plain presentation of his pots: he has taken the opportunity to restate the beliefs of a group of scholars who, following the lead of the late Sir John Beazley, continue to maintain that it is a worthwhile task not only to ascribe Greek painted pots to particular named or postulated individuals, but to discuss the social habits of those entities. Hence his inclusion of a series of introductory passages summarizing the characteristics of typologically similar' products in terms of 'painters' and their 'schools'. It may not be apparent to a casual reader, guided only by this text and its bibliographies, that such touching attempts to replicate the methodologies of Renaissance art history (though without its essential documentary sources) rest on no discernible foundations. The uncritical consensus which used to prevail among the small community of scholars concerned with such matters has long since come to an end. Since Dr Williams has chosen to cast his observations in the phraseology of an earlier generation of scholarship, it is incumbent on a reviewer yet again to point out some of the realities of the way pottery was used in the ancient world.

Such a picture can only be derived from the evidence of ancient writers (and it is perhaps symptomatic that Dr Williams makes no reference to any textual source earlier than J. de Witte, who wrote in 1836). A revealing insight into ancient attitudes towards table ware is to be found in Theophrastus' characterization of the Mistrustful Man. Apart from asking his wife after he has gone to bed whether she has locked up the money chest, whether the cupboard has been sealed and whether the front door has been locked, he is the sort of person who, 'whenever someone comes to him to borrow drinking cups he prefers not to give them at all, but if it is a relative or close friend he makes them a loan only after practically testing their composition, weighing them, and nearly asking for someone to guarantee replacement costs' (Characters 18.7). Purity, weight and value are characteristics of metalwork, not pottery. A character in Aristophanes' Banqueters owes a debt of 200 drachmas and repays it with a silver drinking cup (and gold and silver plate was regularly made up in round figures in terms of contemporary currency standards). It has been estimated that the c. 860 grams of silver in this vessel could have bought several hundred kilograms of painted pottery, even vessels by the 'greatest' artists. For there is no apparent differentiation between the ancient prices for vessels decorated by 'good' painters and those for 'bad', or even between figure-painted and plain black-gloss wares. The money asked for this volume, for instance, would in antiquity have bought more than 200 pelekai attributed to Beazley's 'Achilles painter'.

One of the beliefs of the Beazleyite school is that the inscriptions on pots in some sense reflect the world of the potter, and this despite the 'signatures' of one craftsman on the work of another. 'Signatures' are in fact very rare, and occur on far fewer than 1% of extant pots. They can thus hardly have been used for advertising purposes, and the more frequent 'nonsense inscriptions' (jumbles of meaningless letters: pp. 54, 63, 65, 66, 70) suggest that letters on pots might rather be a carry over from designs of the kind we know were made for the crafts of silversmithing and tapestry weaving. To use them as a secure basis for the re-creation of the world of the potter must be an exercise in imagination rather than reconstruction. The evidence of price inscriptions shows that the vessels in question cost very little, and what is known of the lifestyles and patterns of expenditure of the elites who were universally assumed to have enjoyed the use of painted pottery, suggests that ceramic -- no matter how well crafted -- would not have figured large in their everyday experience. Such elites, so far as we can tell, used gold and silver at their festivals and banquets; pottery was a cheap surrogate and most surviving pieces were deposited in tombs by societies who preferred to keep the family silver above ground for the living whose need was greater. If the pots and their decoration are sometimes of exceptionally fine quality, this may be put down to funerary decorum rather than competitive connoisseurship.

The reassertion of a traditional picture, with no hint that scholarship may have moved on, is sadly characteristic of a discipline that has become stuck in a groove. It is only the highly introverted nature of classical archaeology as it is still commonly practised -- isolated as much from the realities of the ancient world as it is from other forms of archaeology -- that allows such phantasies to be repeated. While genuine art history is both a lively and serious form of scholarship, the quaint gentility of the study of what Stuart Piggott has called 'twee Victorian vases' surely deserves its own monument, viz. the Corpus Idearum Antiquarum.

MICHAEL VICKERS Ashmolean Museum, Oxford