page_title: Ceramic art
section_title: The ancient Mediterranean
hierarchical_section_title: Ceramic art / History / Europe / The ancient Mediterranean
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Stehende Frau mit Sonnenhut und Fächer, am blauen Mantel breite Goldborte. Aus Tanagra, 325-300 v. Chr. English: Lady with blue and gilt garment, fan and sun hat, from Tanagra 325-300 BC. Français&#160;: Femme au manteau bleu avec éventail et chapeau de soleil, de Tanagra 325-300 av. J.-C. Italiano: Donna con abito azzurro con bordi dorati, ventaglio e cappello, da Tanagra, 325-300 a.C.
context_page_description: Ceramic art is art made from ceramic materials, including clay. It may take forms including artistic pottery, including tableware, tiles, figurines and other sculpture. As one of the plastic arts, ceramic art is one of the visual arts. While some ceramics are considered fine art, as pottery or sculpture, most are considered to be decorative, industrial or applied art objects. Ceramics may also be considered artefacts in archaeology. Ceramic art can be made by one person or by a group of people. In a pottery or ceramic factory, a group of people design, manufacture and decorate the art ware. Products from a pottery are sometimes referred to as "art pottery". In a one-person pottery studio, ceramists or potters produce studio pottery.
  The word "ceramics" comes from the Greek keramikos, meaning "pottery", which in turn comes from keramos meaning "potter's clay". Most traditional ceramic products were made from clay, shaped and subjected to heat, and tableware and decorative ceramics are generally still made this way. In modern ceramic engineering usage, ceramics is the art and science of making objects from inorganic, non-metallic materials by the action of heat.
context_section_description: Glazed Egyptian faience dates to the third millennium BCE), with painted but unglazed pottery used even earlier during the predynastic Naqada culture. Faience became sophisticated and produced on a large scale, using moulds as well modelling, and later also throwing on the wheel. Several methods of glazing were developed, but colours remained largely limited to a range in the blue-green spectrum.
  On the Greek island of Santorini are some of the earliest finds created by the Minoans dating to the third millennium BCE, with the original settlement at Akrotiri dating to the fourth millennium BCE;  excavation work continues at the principal archaeological site of Akrotiri.  Some of the excavated homes contain huge ceramic storage jars known as pithoi.
  Ancient Greek and Etruscan ceramics are renowned for their figurative painting, especially in the black-figure and red-figure styles.  Moulded Greek terracotta figurines, especially those from Tanagra, were small figures, often religious but later including many of everyday genre figures, apparently used purely for decoration.
  Ancient Roman pottery, such as Samian ware, was rarely as fine, and largely copied shapes from metalwork, but was produced in enormous quantities, and is found all over Europe and the Middle East, and beyond. Monte Testaccio is a waste mound in Rome made almost entirely of broken amphorae used for transporting and storing liquids and other products.  Few vessels of great artistic interest have survived, but there are very many small figures, often incorporated into oil lamps or similar objects, and often with religious or erotic themes (or both together – a Roman speciality).  The Romans generally did not leave grave goods, the best source of ancient pottery, but even so they do not seem to have had much in the way of luxury pottery, unlike Roman glass, which the elite used with gold or silver tableware.  The more expensive pottery tended to use relief decoration, often moulded, rather than paint.  Especially in the Eastern Empire, local traditions continued, hybridizing with Roman styles to varying extents.
caption: Hellenistic Tanagra figurine of c. 320 BCE, probably just intended to represent a fashionable lady with a sun-hat
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