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In ancient Greece, the clay used to produce pottery was known as Attic clay, which is known for its high iron content, giving off an orange-red color with a layer of slight sheen when fired in a kiln. Before being used, the clay would be stored for several hours to several days in settling tanks, with the time they spent in there depending on the different consistencies needed for the specific vessel being made. Potters wheels, which were invented c. 4500 BCE in Mesopotamia and brought over to Greece following the Persian wars, would more often than not be used by Greek potters to make vessels, which were constructed in separate horizontal sections: the foot, the lower and upper body, the neck, and the handles. These sections would then be joined together with a slip of clay after drying. The piece would then be put back on the wheel to smooth the slip marks and be shaped. It was after this shaping that the piece of pottery would be decorated, often painted first with a thick black paint, composed of alkali potash, different clay with a higher silicon content, and a powder of black ferrous oxide of iron, and bound to the pottery with vinegar, which would burn off in the kiln, thus adhering the paint to the pottery. The Romans would work their pottery in a similar method, although they often decorated the exterior of the vessel with reliefs, forgoing the painting process.

Sources:

• Boardman, J. Early Greek Vase Painting, 11th-6th Centuries BC. Thames & Hudson, 1998.

• Lane, A. Greek Pottery. Faber & Faber, London, 1956.

• Oleson. Oxford Handbook of Engineering & Technology in the Classical World, Paperback(2009), 2013.

It is important to know that aesthics completely dropped after the collapse of the Mycenaeans, and would only gradually return. The Submycenaean period of the Dark Age is characterized by repetition of a limited number of vase shapes dependent on Mycenaean models, but much lower level of artistic and technical competence. Decoration is merely bands of colours and shapes. Mid-Dark Age also referred to as the Protogeometric Age. Pottery characterized by the use of a faster potter’s wheel in its fabrication and by the practice of using a compass and multiple brushes connected to each other at equal intervals allowing for concentric circles or arcs. Potters in the protogeometric age begin to work with a greater variety of shapes. Later half of the Dark Age referred to as the Geometric Age. Pottery is characterized by abstract shapes running wild, completely covering the surface of the vessel in a restless but controlled obsession to reduce the exterior of the vase.

Design techniques: Athens around 566 began to replace Corinth as the leading Greek center for the production of painted pottery with figured decoration. For the remainder of the 5th and throughout the 6th century painted Athenian ceramic ware was a desired commodity and was widely exported throughout the Greek world. Athenians commonly used the black-figure technique, in which figures were painted in black on the reddish-orange background of the local clay and the vase was fired in such a way as to give the paint a lustrous black gloss. Interior details were produced by drawing lines with a graver, which scraped the paint allowing the natural colour of the clay to show through. Athenians began to experiment with a new technique around 530 called red-figure. Instead of painting figures in black and incising the interior details, painters tried painting the figure in outline and then filling in the background with paint, so that the figures remained the reddish colour of the clay while the background became black when fired. From the perspective of the viewer, the figures in red-figure scenes produce a more convincing illusion of three-dimensionality. In part because a light-coloured figure stands out more sharply from, and appears closer to the viewer on a dark background. Three-dimensionality is also enhanced because it becomes easier to paint figures that overlap eachother. From the perspective of the creator of the scene, the artist was now painting, rather than incising, the interior details, which could now be produced with a freer, more fluid motion. Further, those details could be better differentiated from one another by the use of a more or less diluted pigment.