Douris and the Painters of Greek Vases

The translator of M. Pottier’s monograph on Douris has kindly asked me to write, by way of preface, a few words on the relation of Greek vase-painting to Greek literature and to Greek mythology. I do this with the more pleasure because this relation has, I think, been somewhat seriously misunderstood, and M. Pottier’s delightful monograph which, thanks to Miss Kahnweiler, is now given to us in English form, should do much to clear away misconception and to set the matter before us in a light at once juster and more vivid.


First let us consider for a moment the relation between Greek art and Greek literature.

In classical matters we are all of us, scholars and students alike, bred up in a tradition that is literary. Our earliest contact with the Greek mind is through Greek poets, historians, philosophers. This is well, for these remain—all said—the supreme revelation. But this priority of literary contact begets, almost inevitably, 


a certain confusion of thought. Bred as we are in a literary tradition, we come later to be confronted with other utterances of the Greek mind, for example graphic art—vase-painting. This we naturally seek to relate to our earlier and purely literary conceptions. What has come to us second we instinctively make subordinate, ancillary. Greek art, and especially what we call a “minor art,” such as vase-painting, is the “hand-maid” of Greek poetry, or, to drop metaphor, the function of Greek art, is, we think, to illustrate Greek literature. Public and publisher alike demand nowadays that books on Greek literature, on Greek mythology, even editions of Greek plays, should be “illustrated” from Greek art.

By illustration is meant translation, the transference with the minimum of alteration of an idea expressed in one art into the medium of another. Were it possible in a work of art to separate the idea expressed from the form in which it is expressed, such transference might be an eligible and even elegant pastime. But every one knows that such separation of idea and form is in art impossible. Translation of poetry from one language to another is precarious, a thing only to be attempted by a poet; translation from one art to another is a task so

vii

 inherently barren that the Greek, till his decadence, left it, instinctively, unattempted.

Against the poison of this “illustration” theory M. Pottier’s monograph is the best antidote, and all students of the Greek mind will be grateful to Miss Kahnweiler for making his monograph more easily accessible. M. Pottier focuses our attention on the personal artist, a man not intent on “illustrating” another man’s work, but on producing works of art of his own. Douris uses sometimes the same material as Homer or Arktinos, but he shapes it to his own decorative ends; he draws his inspiration naturally and necessarily rather from graphic than from literary tradition.


Beneath the “illustration” fallacy there lurks, as regards mythology, another and a subtler misconception.

Until quite recent years mythology has been again to scholars and students alike, a thing of “mythological allusions,” a matter to be “looked up” with a view to the elucidation of obscure passages in Pindar or dramatic choruses. Even nowadays mythology remains, to many a well-furnished scholar, a sort of by-product, an elegant outgrowth of the Greek mind, a thing merely “poetical,” by which he means


 having no touch with reality. Or, at best, if the scholar be himself a poet, he loves mythology without analysing it, he feels it as a dream that haunts, a thing that attends and allures him through the waste places of scholarship, more real and more abiding than any realism, a thing to him so intimate that he does not ask the why of it.

Thanks to the impact of another study, anthropology, we are awake now and look at mythology with other eyes. We know that mythology is not a last, lovely, literary flower, but a thing primitive, deep-seated, long antedating anything that can be called literature, not a separate “subject” at all, but rather a mode of thinking common at an early stage to all subjects. Mythology is not the outcome of an idle, vagrant fancy, but a necessary step in the evolution of human thought; a strenuous step taken by man towards knowledge, towards the fashioning and ordering of the world of mental conceptions. Mythology is the mother-earth out of which for the Greeks grow those stately, fruit-bearing trees, literature, art, history, philosophy. A Greek vase-painter does not “illustrate” mythology, he utters it in line and colour as the poet utters it in words and rhythm.


Take a simple instance from the work of Douris, the kylix in the Louvre, in the centre of which is painted Eos carrying the body of Memnon.

The mythologist, that is man in his early days of thinking, cannot conceive or name the abstract, empty “dawn.” The glow of morning is to him the print of unearthly yet human fingers. He images “dawn” as “Dawn,” in terms of humanity, that is of the one and only thing he inwardly felt and knew—himself. The dawn is for him a beautiful woman, and to complete her humanity, she is a mother. Literature, which is at first but story-telling, took up the tale, and knew that Eos the Dawn who rose in the East had a child of the East for her son, and mourned for him in his death, and carried him away for his burial.

The vase-painter is a mythologist too, and he takes a mythological story for his motive, but his art has other ends than that of the poet. He may have heard the story recited at a Panathenaic festival, just as he may have seen it painted on some Stoa or Lesche. But he does not illustrate it, does not translate from an alien art into his own. He takes the myth and lets his own art say what it and only it can say. He has seen in the human body


 the vision of a heavenly pattern; he gives us the grace of a bending body, the poise of a flying foot, the swiftness of straight lines, the majesty and poignancy of limbs stark in death. That is all, and, surely, enough.

JANE ELLEN HARRISON.