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PLATE X.

Fig. 18. ATTIC GEOMETRIC AMPHORA (DIPYLON CLASS).

Fig. 19.

GEOMETRIC AMPHORA, PROBABLY ATTIC (BLACK DIPYLON CLASS).

nature become richer, corporeal, living, spiritual. Animal representation begins also in the same formulistic manner. The choice is in contrast with the Minoan animal world: there is complete absence of the Oriental animal world of fancy; we only see the Northern fauna; horses, roes, goats, storks, geese. The animals stand upright, graze, or rest with neck turned round. The technique is always that of the pure silhouette; only the birds often, as in the pre-Mycenean and late Mycenean styles (Figs. ssss1 and ssss1), show hatched or cross-hatched inner drawing of the body.

These geometric ornaments and abstract silhouettes of men and animals form the complete stock out of which the artist of the period provides for the decoration of his vases. With them he fills the bands into which he loves to divide the vase (Fig. ssss1); or at all events the shoulder or handle band, constructively the most important, in which case he covers the lower part of the vase with black (Fig. ssss1) or with parallel rings (Fig. ssss1). The bands, the breadth of which is varied, are filled in two ways. Either we have continuous ornaments, and processions of animals, chorus dancers, warriors, chariots and horses, which in this style are essentially nothing but ornament; or he divides the bands, and particularly the handle bands (Fig. ssss1) vertically into rectangular fields, metopes as they are called. The metope naturally takes a different scheme of filling the space from the band; if the latter prefers a continuous series, the former requires ornaments complete in themselves, like circles and rosettes, or in the case of figures, the antithetical group, the heraldic opposition of two different fields of figures, or of two figures in the same field. The figures connected by compulsion of space are then more closely united by a central motive, and there arise ornamental compositions not at all drawn from actual life, e.g. two birds both holding in their beaks a fish or a snake, two horses with crossed fore-legs, rearing towards each other, tied to a tripod, or held by a man with a bridle, two roes with raised fore-legs leaning against a tree. Band and metope with their compulsory schematism no longer suffice for the growing need of representation: in the large vases the chief band is often made very high, or in the upper part of the vase a rectangle adorned with ornament or figures is left out from the surrounding black: thus arises the vase with special field for subjects.