Corinthian Greek Pyxis

This amazing Corinthian Greek Pyxis is a high quality hand painted replica of the actual historic vessel made in Athens.

The term “Aegean art” refers to a cluster of differing cultures that flourished in the area of the Aegean Sea in the eastern Mediterranean. This category of ancient art of classical antiquity – a precursor of Greek art (c.650-27 BCE) – commonly includes three civilizations: the Cycladic, the Minoan and the Mycenean, which first emerged around 2,600 BCE and ended about 1100 BCE. Although later than “Sumerian art”, Aegean cultures coincided with the rise of later forms of Mesopotamian art and Mesopotamian sculpture – such as “Assyrian art” (c.1500-612 BCE) and “Hittite art” (c.1600-1180 BCE) – Aegean artists developed their own styles.

Corinthian style paintings or orientalizing style was the product of cultural ferment in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean of the 8th and 7th centuries BC. Fostered by trade links with the city-states of Asia Minor, the artifacts of the East influenced a highly stylized yet recognizable representational art. 

It was characterized by an expanded vocabulary of motifs: sphinx, griffin, lions, etc., as well as a repertory of non-mythological animals arranged in friezes across the belly of the vase. In these friezes, painters also began to apply lotuses or palmettes. Depictions of humans were relatively rare. Those that have been found are figures in silhouette with some incised detail, perhaps the origin of the incised silhouette figures of the black-figure period.

Geometrical features remained in the style called proto-Corinthian, embracing the orientalizing experiment, yet coexisted with a conservative sub-geometric style. The ceramics of Corinth were exported all over Greece, and their technique arrived in Athens, prompting the development of a less markedly Eastern idiom there. During this time described as Proto-Attic, the orientalizing motifs appear but the features remain not very realistic. The painters show a preference for the typical scenes of the Geometrical Period, like processions of chariots.