 Hi everyone and welcome to your daily Barnes takeout. I'm Karl Walsh, I'm a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Research, Interpretation and Education here at the Barnes and today we're going to go have a look at a Greek vase which is located in the cabinet against the north wall ensemble in room 15 and this is a cabinet we visited a number of times to look at a couple of different objects but there is just so much to see in this cabinet so it's lovely to come back to it. So the Greek vase that we're having a look at today is located here on the top shelf and it dates to the Iron Age of Greece in the 8th century BC which is a period that we call the geometric period which is named after the style of vase painting that appears at this time and if we zoom in on our vase so here it is a little bit closer you can immediately see why geometric is a particular keyword for this type of vase painting we've got these fantastic geometric patterns which run across the entire surface of the vessel and you can see that there's really no breeding space it's very busy all the available space is kind of full of decoration and we call this particular kind of technique horror vacui which is just kind of filling all of the available surface space with some form of decoration and this makes it a little bit busy and overwhelming but if you look closely rather than being kind of very repetitive a lot of this geometric design on this vessel is very unique and there's a lot of attention paid to by the artist in presenting something kind of unique and different in every register that we have and a lot of these vessels are divided up into lots and lots of different registers in terms of decoration so looking at our vessel you can see that at the top near the rim we've got this nice repeating pattern of kind of rhomboids or diamonds with little dots in the center of them we have this kind of zigzagging pattern which within it has these alternating bands of kind of hatched linear decoration just lovely little details that really pop out when you look into it a little bit closer and then we've got this kind of band of checkered patterning and then below we have below we have these panels which have alternating scenes of a small rosette again with these kind of nice linear hatching patterns inside the decoration and the same thing goes for these little bands that kind of just separate the different panels and then in this scene here we have a little figural scene of a deer or more likely some kind of antelope with what looks like some kind of fowl like maybe a goose or a kind of or maybe a stork or eagret of some kind and I really like this little scene the antelope has this real kind of sense of energy and movement to it and it's very kind of elegantly presented but at the same time it's very kind of schematic and very kind of in keeping with this kind of geometric theme it's very kind of angular and looks like it's comprised of shapes rather than kind of being a kind of representational image of what an antelope really looks like and then you can see even just in the small spaces here there's little attempts to kind of fill up the space with additional pieces of decoration and patterning which again really common in geometric vase painting and we don't really know what the meaning of the pairing of kind of antelope and sometimes deer or horses with birds in these scenes but they're very common in geometric vase painting and there's obviously some kind of meaning or relevance behind them but we just don't really understand what it is and then on the body of the vase we have some more kind of linear and kind of waved line decoration we have these nice rhomboids here which kind of looked to me like cowry shells which kind of form a nice little band around the main body and then tapering down towards the base we've got some more kind of linear decoration and horizontal lines and things as well and what you might not kind of immediately notice as well is that the handle is actually decorated too and you can see here that it's this lovely stylized snake or maybe even like the skeleton of a snake because it has these kind of little strokes that are coming off of it which kind of remind me of a millipede a little bit but then it also kind of looks maybe like a snake skeleton too and again we don't really understand what the significance of snakes are but they often appear specifically on the handles of geometric bases and sometimes they are actually kind of modeled in 3D on the handle too so there's obviously some kind of meaning and it always appears kind of on the specific part of the vessel too so kind of interesting it maybe has like some kind of apotropaic function like some kind of magical protection or maybe connected with healing in some way but saying that all of these designs kind of work together to create this almost kind of psychedelic effect that really catches the eye and it's certainly intentional because geometric ceramics are often very monumental they were actually while they take the form of something that is used for drinking and for storage they're usually found in cemeteries particularly around Athens and they were used often for as grave markers so these can sometimes actually be funerary monuments which are dedicated to an individual and which is a pretty different function than what we would assume by just looking at this object but saying that they still take the form of vessels which also tells us a lot about what the Greeks are doing in using pottery in life too and the form of this vessel is pretty kind of clear it's got this flaring rim and a nice big handle and this great big body which clearly is meant to hold liquid so it's definitely some kind of pouring vessel and we know we call this specific type of vessel anonokoi which is specifically used for serving wine and at this time in kind of the 8th century in Greece the Greeks are forming lots of new practices surrounding the consuming of wine which are probably heavily influenced from wine drinking practices in the ancient Near East from the Phoenicians and from the Assyrians and the Greeks are adapting this into a new form and new type of kind of Greek drinking event which they call the symposium and these are basically kind of big male only drinking parties which have this real emphasis on drinking on the kind of decadent consumption of wine and getting very drunk and kind of this theme of drunkenness and the Greeks develop their own specialized range of ceramic vessels that are all tied in with the consumption of wine in these big parties and one of the things I like to think about in thinking about why this decoration appears on these types of vessels is how it's really kind of when you're drunk these patterns must have been very kind of disorientating a little bit kind of trippy and because you know they they are very kind of confusing and overwhelming and maybe this helped to kind of create a sense of drunkenness and kind of highlight an altered state of mind when you're using them and why they're kind of decorated in this way and to get the an idea of the types of vessels used in the symposium we don't actually have to go far we actually have to only go back to our cabinet here at the barns and look at where this vessel is being presented so in this cabinet you've got two of these large onakoi which are both geometric in date and then we have two smaller vessels here which are from later periods they're from the archaic and classical periods in Greece but they're both connected to the symposium so we have this amphora and then this is called a crater and an amphora is basically used for storing and transporting wine and a crater is used for mixing and preparing wine so the Greeks preferred to have their wine mixed with water to dilute it down and these craters would be used as a vessel where you could basically mix the wine with water and then the onakoi are used for then serving the wine so what we have here in the cabinet is almost a kind of a symposium assemblage which kind of really shows off the range of vessels that are used and also the types of decoration that feature on these and I really like how they kind of tell the story about what the Greeks are doing with their drinking practices and the only real type of vessel that we're missing from this kind of assemblage is the kylex which is a very broad and shallow drinking vessel which often has handles as well but this is the main type of vessel that you would actually drink the wine from so if we had one of those that would kind of complete the set but next time that you're having a look at this cabinet think about how these vessels would have been used in life and how the painting might have added to the experience of the drinking party in terms of kind of storytelling and the visual effects of the decoration and kind of being drunk so I hope you enjoyed this barn's takeout we'll be coming to you on a weekly basis in the future so please subscribe to our channel to continue your daily serving of art and please leave a comment we really enjoy reading and responding to these too so please take care and stay safe for a family executive director of the barn's foundation I hope you enjoyed barn's takeout subscribe and make sure your post notifications are on to get daily servings of art thanks for watching and for your support of the barn's foundation