(piano music)
- [Steven] We're in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
looking at a gigantic clay pot.
- [Elizabeth] This is form Ancient Greece.
- [Steven] Long before the classical period.
The shape of this vase makes it a crater
and it was found at the Dipylon cemetery in Athens.
- [Elizabeth] Normally when we think about
ancient Greek vases,
we think about containers for wine or liquids
but this ceramic pot had a very different purpose.
This was made to mark a gravesite.
- [Steven] We often think of headstones to mark a gravesite
but the Greeks used ceramic vessels.
Somebody was buried underneath it.
- [Elizabeth] And in fact the bottom of this vase is open
and it's possible that liquid was poured in the top
as an offering for the deceased.
Or it's possible it was just used to drain off rain water.
- [Steven] But what makes this vase so important,
so extraordinary, is its decoration.
- [Elizabeth] It is covered, every inch of this,
with decoration and that decoration
is divided in two bands or registers.
- [Steven] This particular vase
comes from an early period in Greek history
and the style that is associated with is geometric
because the surface is covered with geometric motifs.
You see diamonds and triangles and circles and meanders.
- [Elizabeth] We also see broad areas of black paint
and stripped areas that form the base.
- [Steven] And this particular pot has pictorial bands
which we call friezes and in them,
and this is a little bit unusual for the geometric period,
we see human figures and we see animals
and the pictures remind us that this is funerary.
- [Elizabeth] The large central scene along the top register
shows us a figure on a bier, a dead figure,
who's being mourned
and the figures on either side of him, the female figures,
have raised their arms in a gesture of grief.
- [Steven] And some art historians
have interpreted the decorative lines
on either side of the figures as a reference to tears.
- [Elizabeth] And it's also possible that
that checkerboard pattern that's above the deceased figure
represents his funerary shroud
but lifted so that we can see the body.
- [Steven] I love how the human forms
are nearly as abstract as the geometric motifs
that fill the rest of the vase.
The torsos are nearly perfect triangles,
the heads which are shown in profile
are basically circles with eyes in the center.
- [Elizabeth] And the legs are larger shapes
as are the legs of the table that the deceased figure is on
or the legs of the chair.
When you walk up to this you might not even notice at first
that you were looking at a narrative scene,
that you were looking at human figures.
- [Steven] The band below shows a procession
and it's military in nature.
We see chariots, we see horsemen,
we see soldiers with shields and spears and swords.
In fact the bodies are reduced
to the form of ancient Greek shields.
- [Elizabeth] And the horses were given
three horses at a time
and appropriately there are six legs in the front
and six legs in the back
but there's no sense at all
of the space the three horses would occupy.
- [Steven] Everything on the surface
of this vase fills flat.
There is no pictorial depth,
there is no interest in illusion in that sense.
- [Elizabeth] Not at all.
And yet in the scene of a funeral,
with perhaps his wife and child beside him
and mourners around him
we still get a really palpable sense
of sadness, of death here.
- [Steven] The pot was decorated with a material
that is called slip, very fine particles of clay
that are suspended in a liquid
and then painted on to the surface.
The Greeks at this point didn't use kilns
that were hot enough
to create the glassy surface that we take for granted
in modern ceramics that we call glaze
and this kind of ceramic is known as slipware.
- [Elizabeth] And this would have been turned on a wheel.
- [Steven] Probably in sections
and then constructed from those sections.
Producing a pot this size and of this quality
is a major undertaking.
This is clearly representing the wealth
and the power of the family for whom it was made.
- [Elizabeth] So from far away in the cemetery
your eyes might be drawn to this pot
and therefore to the man that this pot commemorates.
(piano music)