Greek Red-Figure Pottery
So somebody had an idea: instead of painting the people black, why not paint the background black and leave the people red? This is harder because you have to carefully paint all around the people in the picture, but it makes the people look much more real. The slip and the firing are exactly the same as in black figure.
But by around 450 BC, just eighty years after the invention of red-figure painting, hardly any vases were still being produced. We don't really know why this happened. Maybe it just went out of style. Some people think that the Athenians became so rich that they all used metal (bronze or silver) dishes instead of pottery. Maybe the Athenians were rich enough that they didn't need to sell their pottery to other people. Also, the Etruscans, who had bought a lot of this pottery, were no longer doing very well by 450 BC, and maybe they couldn't afford to buy Athenian pottery anymore.
One kind of pottery which does last longer is the white-painted lekythos, which was placed on graves, like a tombstone. These tombstones were made until about 400 BC.
Stone Age
Early Bronze Age
Late Bronze Age
Sub-Mycenean (Dark Age)
Geometric
Black-Figure
Red-Figure
Project on Greek pottery
To find out more about Greek Red-Figure pottery, check out these books from Amazon.com or your library:
Athenian Red Figure Vases: The Archaic Period : A Handbook, by John Boardman (1985)
Athenian Red Figure Vases: The Classical Period : A Handbook, by John Boardman (1989)
The Archaeology of Greece: An Introduction, by William R. Biers (1996)
Greek Art and Archaeology (3rd Edition), by John G. Pedley (2002).
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