Vase (art)

“ But the most remarkable object in the collection is a vase, on which the sculptor has lavished all his skill and all his thought. Those who feel the true end of art will not think that the labour and time he has bestowed upon this beautiful work have been thrown away, for it is not as a mere object of curiosity, but as a monument of art, that we must look at it. ”

“ One superb and elegant vase with therms, beautifully enamel’d with figures, the Three Graces on one side and a landscape on the other, in compartments, enriched with chased and burnished gold, and 2 ewer-shape vases to match, figure of Virtue on one side and Prudence on the other. ”

“ A vase, with or without flowers, to add to the composition of your room, that is, to make "a good picture," must be placed so that its background sets it off. Let the Venetian glass vase holding one rose stand in such a position that your green curtain is its background, and not a photograph or other picture. One flower, carefully placed in a room, will have more real decorative value than dozens of costly roses strewn about in the wrong vases, against mottled, line-destroying backgrounds.
Flowers are always more beautiful in a plain vase, whether of glass, pottery, porcelain or silver. ”

“ There are vases which, while offering for our admiration a beauty which is eternal, are yet invested with a chameleon-like power of change. They never allow monotony to break their charm. It may consist of a mere color. Take the old turquoise-blue of China. The eye can scarcely catch the fleeting shades, to determine whether the vase is blue or green. While daylight lasts, the blue is dominant, but when the lamps are lit in the evening, the blue gives place to a green of greatly increased brilliancy. ”

“ People who have progressed in civilisation show their feeling for art and their æsthetic feeling also in vases which are multiplied in almost infinite form, as we see in Egyptian, Etruscan, and Greek art.
The vase then comes into being, attains perfection, and is multiplied in its uses and its forms, in the course of human civilisation; and the history of the vase follows the history of humanity itself. ”

“ Equally so is the exquisite vase which accompanied the messages of congratulation and is to commemorate them, and upon which not a few of the flowers associated with may name or with my special studies are so deftly wrought by art, that of them one may almost say, “The art itself is nature.” ”

“ The Dodwell vase shows you the more simple style of decoration which was used in the earlier times. Gradually the designs came to be more and more elaborate, until whole stories were as distinctly told by the pictures on vases as if they had been written out in books. The next cut, which is made from a vase-painting, will show what I mean.
The subject of Fig. 16 is connected with the service of the dead, and shows a scene in the under world, such as accorded with ancient religious notions. In the upper portion the friends of the deceased are grouped around a little temple. ”

“ He understands that a few judicious strokes may have a finer, and, by their suggestiveness, a fuller, effect than crowded detail and the most delicate shading. They show, further, that the art of decorating a vase with human figures consists in judgment as much as in execution. ”

“ We have similarly, in the faience vases of Haviland now under consideration, constant hints of inspiration drawn from the simplest forms of nature. A branch falls upon a vase and becomes its ornament. A butterfly hangs for a moment on fluttering wing and drops from its flight, and it too becomes an ornament. The workman leaves his unfinished work at night, and when he returns at day-break, finds that a lizard or an asp has crept upon the still slimy vase to bask itself in the first rays of the morning sun. It darts out of sight, but it has left an idea which appears in the decoration ”

“ Fine art made some of its earliest and most successful efforts in shaping the earthen vase, engraving and moulding patterns or figures on it, and painting it with pictures of gods and heroes, or scenes from myth or daily life, so that much of our knowledge of such nations as Etruscans and even Greeks is derived from the paintings on their vases, art-relics almost everlasting though so fragile. A great part of the pottery of the world is still of the first and simplest kind, mere baked clay (Italian terra cotta) without glaze like our flower-pots, and therefore porous. ”

“ In Greek vase decoration the conventional floral forms, or the mannered animal figures that follow each other monotonously round vases of the “Oriental” style, belong to the domain of ornament, while the human forms, say, on the earliest red-figured vases, while displayed in pleasing patterns and in studied relation to the shape and structure of the vessel, exhibit so much variety and so great an effort on the part of the artist to achieve similitude to nature, that they claim a place for themselves in the annals of the painter’s art. ”

“ Either forms were varied and became in themselves ornamental, or a superficial decoration was resorted to. The useful led to the beautiful, and their combination, as seen on the dinner-tables of our day, is the natural result of a universal process by which nations have advanced from rude and unskilful ignorance to art. The aboriginal American potter decorated his coarse vase with a few scratches made with a stick; his modern successor moulds his porcelain into graceful forms, and brings to its ornamentation a palette of bright colors, a trained hand, and a cultivated taste. ”

“ It must never be forgotten that vase-painting is essentially a decorative art; but, as we shall see later in tracing its historical development, there is always a tendency to ignore the essential subserviency of design to use, and to give the decoration a more pictorial character. Many of the late vases are, in fact, pictures on terracotta. Again, there is a class of fifth-century vases with polychrome paintings on white ground which actually recall the method we know to have been employed by the great master of that century, Polygnotos. ”

“ Instead of being moulded, the ornamentation of leaves or flowers is carved out of clay laid upon the surface of the vase while still moist from the hands of the thrower. The effect is similar to that obtained by mouldings, but the work is finer, the details more highly finished, and the outlines sharper and clearer. Of the designs in these and the pieces decorated with mouldings, the best are those in which leaves either lie across the vase or form a calyx from which it rises upward. The absence of color allows the attention to rest solely upon the fidelity with which every detail is rendered. ”

“ The idea underlying the art is that flowers should not be thrown anyhow in a bundle into a vase, but that due consecration should be given to their artistic arrangement. The flowers should even in a vase be arranged as they might appear in nature. It is not always, it is true, as they actually appear in the open air: but they are arranged as they might look if aided by art under certain conditions, for the flowers in the vase always have a degree of symmetry which is but rarely found in nature. ”

“ The next group shows the operation of “throwing,” a boy turning the wheel while an old man shapes the vessel. On the left is a young man sitting and holding on his knees a vase to which he seems to be attaching the handle. The entire composition is interesting, since—assuming the old man with the crook to be Homer, and not the proprietor of the pottery—it illustrates a poem which shows how widely, even at the early age in which the poet lived, the various operations in making vases were understood. For our present purpose, however, attention is chiefly directed to the furnace. ”

“ To make a very effective centerpiece for a linen or handkerchief window, cut from any old boards the shape of a vase, say thirty-six inches high. Pad one side of this to the shape of a vase with old papers, excelsior or any old rubbish; cover with muslin, then puff all over with cheesecloth; now two feet from your dark background stretch from floor to ceiling coarse, black tarletan; place the flat side of vase against this and pin your handkerchiefs or napkins on in vine and flower effect. The tarletan is entirely invisible and the goods have the appearance of “growing” right out of the vase. ”

“ The flower plays only a small part, and is not used in decoration, except on the branch and stem as it is in nature, and the art consists in the preservation of the natural bend and growth when fixed in the vase. In every case, each branch has certain curves, which must be in harmony with the whole. Branches of pine, bamboo, and the flowering plum are much used. ”

“ Tens of thousands of these vases have been brought to light from tombs and sanctuaries on Greek and Italian sites and the number is constantly increasing. Thanks to the indestructible character of pottery, the designs are often intact. Now the materials and methods employed by the vase- painters and the spaces at their disposal were very different from those of mural or easel paintings. Consequently inferences must not be hastily drawn from designs upon vases as to the composition and coloring of the great masterpieces. ”

“ These lovely features can be found on hundreds of vases, because, vase-making being rather a trade than an art, men kept close to the old models long after great sculptors and painters had, like Polygnotus, begun to depart from the antique stiffness of the countenance.27 The Artemis in question has, however, these very features, which are very clear when we can see her in profile. ”

“ All the famous works of the olden time—from the Portland vase down through all the chaste and truly beautiful varieties of vases, plaques, medallions, services, &c.—are still made in all their beauty, with the addition of many new and ever-varying designs and combinations. ”

“ It is represented with a wide mouth displaying teeth, two spines or horns upon the end of the snout, and fins upon the back and sides. Fig. 108 gives the top view of another fish vase, which is supported, as are the others, by three legs. The body is flat and is encircled by well modeled fins. The head is rather flat and has the eyes and nose on the upper surface. I close this series of illustrations with an outline of a fine vase (Fig. 109) the rim of which is decorated with a single head of extremely grotesque and repulsive character. ”

“ The painting is a thoroughly ugly and, from an artistic standpoint, worthless specimen that represents the very decadence of ceramic art [232] . The vase is a slender amphora with three zones of 125pictures; ours is the middle one. On the left a woman in chiton and mantle sits with head turned to the right, her left hand resting on a sceptre or staff and her right on her knee. She wears a necklace and on one arm a bracelet. Standing before her with outstretched right hand is a bearded male figure in short chiton and mantle, and a spear in his left ”

“ Upon the shoulder are two sharp nodes, standing for the breasts, and between these are markings that represent a necklace. A rude design in red lines covers the upper surface of the body.
Fig. 160. Two handled vase with life form and linear decoration—1⁄2.
A graceful shape is illustrated in Fig. 160. The paste is a grayish orange on the surface and is rather dark within the thicker portions of the walls. The under surface is much blackened by use over fire. An interesting feature is seen upon the handles at the highest point of the loop. ”

“ Vid my Attitude of the Greek Tragedians toward Art, p. 12 ff., for a discussion of this passage.
134. So Eur. Orest. v. 321; Elekt. v. 1345.
135. Naples, no. 3249, photo, Alinari, 11296, from which fig. 6 is taken. The painting was published by Jahn, Vasenbilder, 1839, pl. 1. 1, from a drawing. Jahn himself had not seen the vase. The drawing does the fine picture so little justice that I could not think of reproducing it. The work on the vase is wonderfully clear and strong. Every figure is in itself a beautiful work of art. ”

“ Set the stump in a flower-pot saucer, filled with earth, and planted with mosses and tiny ferns; fit a footless wine or champagne glass, or a plain cup, into the hollow end, and, with a bunch of grasses and wild flowers, or autumn leaves, you have a really exquisite vase, prettier than any formal article bought in a shop, [page 49] and costing little more than time and patience, with a touch of that rare thing—taste! which, after all, is not so very rare as some people imagine. Any friend will prize such a vase of your own making. ”

“ The whole is covered by an enormous bent glass shade, from the centre of which rises a pretty copy of Her Majesty's crown. Nothing can be more beautiful or in better taste than the object we have described. Near it is another vase, not so large, and filled with wax fruit of every kind—the bloom of the grape, the blush of the apple, the rich brown of the nut, the velvet of the apricot, the glow of the orange, and the characteristics of a hundred other fruits being represented with a tantalizing fidelity. ”

“ I might say to God: 'God, if you please, this small blue vase on my window-sill—I see it and I touch it and I love it—will you tell me, you who know, is there a blue vase there or is there no vase?'
And God might merely glance at the vase through his glass and daintily hold his white handkerchief crumpled-up in his gray-gloved fingers and might merely say: 'Madame, you have eyes with which to see the vase and hands with which to touch it and sentiments to lend it charm for you, no doubt. ”