Art: TO GRECIAN URNS

FROM the moment they were dug out of their forgotten tombs early in the 19th century, ancient Greek vases moved art lovers to lyrical expressions of delight. One Grecian urn inspired John Keats to write the famed lines: ” ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” In the next century the vases aroused the collector’s instinct in the late William Randolph Hearst. He began buying in 1901, owned 400 when he died 50 years later. Last year New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art bought 65 of the Hearst vases, which have proved so popular that the Met is leaving them on special exhibition for a full year.

Exquisitely shaped, the vases show the ancient Greeks as they were, their manlike gods and godlike men, their moments of joy and ecstasy, of heroism and erotic abandon. Whether they portray an Olympic race, a night on the town or a musician lost in his art (opposite), the figures have a bouncy, springlike energy that most observers find irresistible.

The Greeks began making the vases in the 7th century B.C. with the figures painted in solid black on the reddish clay of the vase. Details were engraved on the black figures with a sharp instrument of some sort, and white and dark red were used as accessory colors. In about 530 B.C. the red-figure technique was introduced, with the background painted black and the figures left in the original reddish color of the vase. Painter and potter worked as a team. The potter threw his shape on the wheel and handed it over to the painter, who put his design on it while it was still in a dry-mud unfired state.

The art reached its peak in the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. when painters achieved such individuality of style that their work, though usually unsigned, is identifiable today. The painters are usually called by an object they may have painted well, like the Pig Painter, or after a city where one of their better works may be located, like the Berlin Painter, who did the red-figure amphora (opposite). But by the beginning of the 3rd century B.C., the art that had so deftly wedded form, decoration and utility died out and has never since been revived.