Greek Aryballos, 570 BCE

This Aryballos-style Archaic Greek vessel was created around 570 BCE.  The vessel, standing only roughly three inches tall, is made of terracotta and decorated by a black-figure painting technique upon a light background.  The container was designed to hold oil, which Greek athletes would apply to their bodies after pouring it onto the disk-like lip of the pot.

The vessel was crafted by Nearchos, and likely painted by him as well.  Nearchos noteably made lipped cups early in the Archaic period, and incised his signature into an isolated portion of his work, marking the early rise of an Attic tradition of signing pottery in this fashion.  His sons went into the business, and his family became rather wealthy.

Along the side of the lip of the aryballos, tiny, highly stylized, and intricately painted images of pygmies and cranes battle each other:  an exotic subject formally rendered in line with the characteristically geometric Archaic style.  Hermes and Perseus are depicted on the sides of the vessel’s handle, with two Tritons atop the handle, and three ghastly satyrs painted upon the handle’s main face.  The vase as a whole is very geometrically rendered and abstract, with colorful crescent shapes enveloping the spherical body of the vessel and thin shapes decorating the top of the vessel’s lip.  The sense of unified perpetual movement created through these forms and inclusion of figure-less patterns such as these are characteristics unfamiliar to Classical Greek art, and distinguish the work as clearly Archaic.

It is interesting to note that most of the inscriptions around the figures on the vessel are not from any actual language.  The reason for this is unknown; the arbitrary letters could be abbreviations of some kind, meaningful only to people of its time period of origin, or could purely be nonsense.  Thus, while the function of the vessel is known today, the complete significance and sentiment of its decorative forms is now unknown, for modern understanding is limited to deciphering the images.  Still, these playfully written “words”, along with the colorful and deeply contrasted patterns, give the overall object a whimsical mood, despite the dark subject matter, contrary to the stoic images of the later Classical period.