Two Plastic Vases

STUDENTS of aesthetics have noted the difference in the kind of pleasure derived from looking at a small object of art and that derived from the contemplation of a work of monumental size. Before the latter, the observer stands abashed, his laughter and light talk subdued; but with some small work of art held cosily in the hand, a cheerful and light-hearted mood is evoked. Such is the pleasure derived from holding the little perfume pot [Plate VIII], measuring only five and a half centimetres in height, which was recently purchased by the Museum. It is reported to come from Rhodes, and that report may be believed since helmeted head-vases almost identical with ours have been found in that island. It is made of reddish buff clay. The helmet is covered with a black glaze paint, whereas a less lustrous, dark medium is used for the pupils, the eyebrows, the eyelashes, and the mustache. White is used for the iris of the eyes, for the rosettes of the cheek pieces, and for the patterns on the frontal of the helmet. This type of helmet , as Miss Maximova has pointed out in her recent book, Les vases plastiques dans l’antiquité, in describing a similar vase in Berlin, is quite different from that of the Corinthian helmet. The dome does not follow the forehead, but is lifted vertically to make room for a semi-circular piece adorned with a palmette, which here is rendered with both red paint and with incised lines. Above this rises the frontal which Miss Maximova regards as a survival of the Homeric φαλος. A similar vase from the collection of the late Cecil Torr, sold at Sotheby’s in July, 1929, has come to America, and another is in the Metropolitan Museum. They have been assigned to the end of the seventh century.

It is interesting to compare this little head-vase with one made two centuries later in Attica [Plate IX]. The Attic piece, from the Dillwyn Parrish collection, measures twenty-two and a half centimetres in height, approximately four time that of the little Rhodian pot, and, removed by this increase in size from that category of vases which are “cosey in the hand”, it makes an appeal more akin to that of sculpture. Although the archaic curls about the forehead were painted red and a garland of ivy leaves about the head was rendered in white, the effect was far less gay than that of the Rhodian pot. We are further from the East and from those richly decorated surfaces of Eastern art which influenced so profoundly Greek work of the seventh century before Christ. Instead, the potter’s appeal is based on purity of line and simplicity of form which are less adapted to a plastic vase than either to pure ceramics or to pure sculpture. The place of the vase in the history of Attic pottery has been fixed by Professor Beazley of Oxford in a recent issue of the Journal of Hellenic Studies. He has divided Attic vases in the form of human heads into twenty-three groups, to the fourteenth and largest of which may be assigned the Museum’s specimen. It has a slightly taller neck and is accordingly slightly later than a very similar vase in Berlin reproduced by Professor Beazley, and is probably to be assigned to the third quarter of the fifty century.

E.H.D.