page_title: Geometric art
section_title: Late Geometric period
hierarchical_section_title: Geometric art / Pottery in the Geometric style / Late Geometric period
caption_attribution_description: English: Dipylon vase, National Archaeological Museum in Athens; picture made on the basis: Image:Dypilon vase.JPG - author: Prof saxx Polski: Waza dipylońska, 760-750 p.n.e., Narodowe Muzeum Archeologiczne w Atenach; obraz wykonany na bazie: Image:Dypilon vase.JPG- autor: Prof saxx.
context_page_description: Geometric art is a phase of Greek art, characterized largely by geometric motifs in vase painting, that flourished towards the end of the Greek Dark Ages, circa 900 BC – 700 BC. Its center was in Athens, and from there the style spread among the trading cities of the Aegean. The Greek Dark Ages are also called the Geometric period in reference to this characteristic pottery style, although the historical period is much longer than the art-historical period, being circa 1100 – 800 BC. The vases had various uses or purposes within Greek society, including, but not limited to, funerary vases and symposium vases.
context_section_description: While the technique from the Middle Geometric period was still continued at the beginning of the 8th century BC, some potters enriched again the decorative organization of the vases, stabilized the forms of the animals in the areas of the neck and the base of the vase, and introduced between the handles, the human form. The Late Geometric Period was marked by a 1.62 meter amphora that was made by the Dipylon painter at around 760-750 BC. The vase was a grave marker to an aristocratic woman in the Dipylon cemetery. This was the first phase of the Late Geometric period (760–700 BC), in which the great vessels of Dipylon ware placed on the graves as funeral monuments, and represent with their height (often at a height of 1.50 m) and the perfection of their execution, the highest expression of the Greek Geometric art.
  The focal point of the funerary vases (kraters) was now the body lying in state (prothesis) and the wail of the dead (Amphora in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens), carrying out to the grave with an honorary chariot race (Krater in the Athens National Archaeological Museum), and various other subjects thought to be related to similar descriptions of the Homeric epics.
  People and animals are depicted geometrically in a dark glossy color, while the remaining vessel is covered by strict zones of meanders, crooked lines, circles, swastikas, in the same graphical concept. Later, the main tragic theme of the wail declined, the compositions eased, the geometric shapes have become more freely, and areas with animals, birds, scenes of shipwrecks, hunting scenes, themes from mythology or the Homeric epics led Geometric pottery into more naturalistic expressions.
  One of the characteristic examples of the Late Geometric style is an oldest surviving signed work of a Greek potter Aristonothos (or Aristonophos) (7th century BC). The vase was found at Cerveteri in Italy and illustrates the blinding of Polyphemus by Odysseus and his companions. From the mid-8th century BC, the closer contact between Greece and the East enriched the ceramic art with new subjects – such as lions, panthers, imaginary beings, rosettes, palmettes, lotus flowers etc. – that led to the Orientalizing Period style, in which the pottery style of Corinth distinguished.
caption: The Dipylon Amphora, mid-8th century BC, with human figures. National Archaeological Museum, Athens
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