The Frames of Greek Painted Pottery

Introducing the Parergon Some readers may expect a chapter on Greek painted pottery to hold special significance within a volume on framing in ancient art: on the one hand, because of the particular connection that the word ‘frame’ has come to assume with pictures and paintings; and on the other, as a result of the modern tendency to address the pictures on Greek pots as easel-paintings. The main goal of my chapter is to take issue with this latter reason, arguing against two tendencies still found in recent literature on Greek art: that of addressing the relationship between the pictures on pots and the boundaries of the field to which they belong in terms of a painting-frame relationship; and that of presenting this relationship in terms analogous to those found in Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790), with the picture seen as the work, and the frame as its peripheral adjunct. My argument here is that the borders of pictures on Greek pots, far from being external supplements to the work, are integral constituents of the visual and spatial field to which they belong: so much so that often the ways in which painters articulate the relationship between the pictures and their boundaries have a particular relevance at the semantic level, with those formal solutions significantly contributing to an image's meaning. This argument will require a lengthy exercise in close viewing, and a systematic analysis of the full spectrum of relations and interactions between pictures and boundaries in Greek painted pottery. More precisely, for the sake of geographical and chronological consistency, I will be focusing on Attic Archaic and Classical black- and red-figure pots of the sixth and fifth centuries BC – leaving aside, for example, the hyper-decorated vessels of the Late Classical period from southern Italy, which would require a lengthy analysis in their own right. At the same time, in my presentation of the material, I will not always proceed in a strict chronological order – above all, since many of the solutions addressed here may be found throughout the Archaic and Classical periods.