Tours: Pottery in Athens

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Opening RemarksPottery RetrospectiveClay Extraction and Vase ShapingPotterFiring Pottery

• Aspasia: Hello, wanderer. May I introduce you to the Kerameikos, the kiln that warms all of Athens' pottery?

("Who are you?")

• Aspasia: My name is Aspasia. Though I am not original from Athens, I have climbed to the top of its social ladder using my wit and intellect. I've even earned the love of Perikles, one of the most powerful men in the city. The mind truly is a beautiful thing.

("What do you think of this place?")

• Aspasia: The art produced here is some of the most beautiful in the Greek world. I envy the potters' skill, though I'm not quite as envious of their clay-stained hands. It's bad for the nails.

("I would like to begin the tour.")

• Aspasia:

Pinax with scene of a potter's workshop / 625-600 BCE (Archaic Greece)

The Kerameikos was a large, sprawling area northwest of Athens's akropolis.

While part of it was used as a graveyard, it was also dedicated to the creation of pottery.

The Kerameikos was so significant to the art form that its name lives on in the word "ceramics".

Perhaps drawn by the river, potters moved into the area and formed their own bustling community.

It's believed that by the end of the 5th century BCE, hundreds of thousands of pottery vessels had been made in Athens, including everything from heavy, undecorated cooking pots, to delicates and beautiful containers reserved for the most precious oils.

Sadly, only around one percent of these works survive today, some only in small fragments.

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Unfortunately, no ancient manuals for making pottery have survived to the present day, and there is only limited visual and textual evidence to explain how ceramic works were created.

However, the vases themselves provide a few clues. Some pots were decorated with behind-the-scenes glimpses of potters and painters at work. These visual narratives, along with the texts of ancient authors, suggest that pottery-making was a family affair, with fathers teaching their sons the craft at a young age. One base even shows a woman working as a painter, which again suggests that pottery-making was a family business.

Miners extracting clay, scene from a votive pinax / 570 BCE (Archaic Greece)

Raw clay from a river was hardly fit for a potter's wheel.

Athenian potters used clay that was rich in iron, which created the distinctive orange-red coloring seen in Athenian pottery.

But this high-quality clay needed to be handled carefully to avoid disasters in the kiln later on.

The clay was first brought to settling beds, where it was mixed with water to wash out any organic debris like leaves.

Once it was purified, workers kneaded the clay with their hands to push out air bubbles and create the texture necessary for a flawless finish.

One of the goals of these early steps was to remove any impurities that could destroy a delicate design, or worse, render a vase unusable.

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While we describe Athenian vases as painted, their red and black designs weren't actually the result of paint, but of a special preparation of the clay itself known as a slip.

Levigated slips were named after a process in which water was used to help refine the finest particles of clay from the coarser, heavier ones, leaving a solution that was equal parts water and clay. Different clays with different mineral compositions offered a palette of options for pottery makers. For example, white clays were used to add light highlights in black and red-figure scenes.

Slips were also a key element of vase construction, and were used to help attach segments of larger vases together, and to help anchor elements like handles to the body of the vessel.

Terracotta head kantharos with two female heads, attributed to the Brygos painter / 490-480 BCE (Classical Greece)

Once the clay was cleaned, it was up to the potter to shape it into a vase by spinning it on a wheel or pressing it into a mold.

Their choice depended on what shape they wanted for the vase, but they also considered the possible scope of its decoration.

Potters did not work alone. A workshop might have had many people working together on different aspects of production.

Potters collaborated with many different painters for decorating their creations. Some of these painters even became potters themselves.

All in all, a single vase could be worked on by many different artists, with each one focusing on a different aspect of its design.

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Vases often had inscriptions known as poietes—or signatures—that identified the workshop or owner responsible for the overall production of the vase. Sometimes, a vase named both its potter and its painter.

Most Athenian potters and painters remain anonymous, but over the years, scholars have identified the specific styles of hundreds of individual artists and workshops, even though their names have been lost. These identifications have been achieved by examining different qualities on the vases such as the placement of relief lines, sketched designs, and even the shapes of painted eyes and noses.

Example of a misfired black-figure cup / 470-470 BCE (Classical Greece)

After the pots were shaped and decorated, they were packed into kilns for the lengthy and delicate firing process.

The process had three stages: oxidation, reduction, and re-oxidation.

The main purpose of the firing process was to carefully manage the clay's exposure to oxygen.

The chemical reactions caused by firing gave the pots their distinctive orange-red coloring.

This also turned the designs made from the clay decoration slips glossy and black.

The most difficult part of the firing process was managing the fires themselves.

It required an enormous amount of skill and experience to properly judge the exact temperatures needed, and even the smallest mistake could ruin several hours of work.

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Experimental archaeological projects and scientific advancements have changed the way researchers understand the ancient firing process. For example, instead of firing a single cycle, it's possible some pottery workshops fired vases twice—or even more.

While discarded shards, misfires, and damaged or unfinished vases may seem like mistakes, they actually offer new clues as to how Ancient Greek pottery workshops functioned.

PaintingClosing Remarks

Black-figure olpe with scene of introduction of Herakles to Olympos, with the signature of the potter: "Amasis made me" (AMASIS EPOIE) / 550-530 BCE (Archaic Greece)

Vases could be decorated in all sorts of ways.

Before 530 BCE, Athenian vases were decorated using the "black-figure" technique, where figures and designs were painted as dark silhouettes.

At the end of the 6th century BCE, painters created a new technique called "red-figure", an inversion of the painting process that left the figures in red and the background in black.

This gave the artists more freedom to better explore details like muscles and individual locks of hair.

Designs were sketched onto the bare surface of the pot using a thin, sharp tool.

Thin relief lines, which helped define subtle elements like facial features, were added using a brush made of a few stiff hairs.

More elaborate vases were sometimes gilded, but these decorations were so delicate they were most likely only added after the firing process.

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Designs were not painted onto vases in the same way we view painting today. Athenian vase painters used a kind of slip—a mixture of clay and water—that became a glaze when the vase was fired.

Different dilutions and concentrations allowed artists to adjust qualities like color and opacity for even finer designs.

Aspasia: You've returned. As you can see pottery is... ("I'm ready for a quiz.") Aspasia: Then let’s get right to it. Starting with an easy one. What was responsible for the orange-red color of most Athenian vases? ("Paint.") ("Leaves.") ("Blood.") ("Iron.") Aspasia: Correct! Athenian potters... ("Can you repeat the question?") ("Take me to the next suggested tour.") ("Take me to a random tour.") ([LEAVE] "That's all for now.") Aspasia: Then we must part ways, at least for now. Farewell, wanderer.

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