Collected works of ancient ceramics show influence of Arthur Dale Trendall

AN antiquities exhibition at the University of Melbourne's Ian Potter Museum reflects the importance of an influential Australasian art historian. 

Glass flasks

THERE is always something intriguing about private collections, especially when they are truly private and anonymous rather than a fashionable accessory for the newly rich.

Contemporary art more often than not falls into this unfortunate latter category, and collections put together by dealers and investment managers are of no more interest than homes tricked out by interior designers.

Collections of things that are not fashionable, and that demand actual knowledge and expertise on the part of the owner, are obviously likelier to be interesting, in the same way other people's libraries are almost always intriguing because they reflect the interests and to some extent personal histories of their owners. And with libraries as with collections, they don't have to be big to be distinguished; in fact if they are too big they become rather impersonal. Comprehensiveness is for museums rather than for private houses.

Again, we expect collections to be found in wealthy quarters of cities: it is easy to imagine substantial houses filled with paintings, studies lined with books and precious objects of various kinds. But experience shows that some large and impressive houses contain little of note, while obscure suburbs may hold unsuspected treasures - the word, in fact, appropriately used as the title for an exhibition of antiquities from private collections at the University of Melbourne's Ian Potter Museum.

The works on display come from 11 private collections scattered across Melbourne, but they have one important thing in common: most of them reflect the influence and teaching of one of the most important art historians Australasia has produced, although one far less well known to most readers than Bernard Smith, the great pioneer of Australian art history who died last September.

Arthur Dale Trendall (1909-95) was one of the greatest scholars of the history of ancient ceramics of the 20th century, a specialist on the ancient wares of southern Italy and Sicily, the region known in antiquity as Magna Graecia. Trendall, as we learn from the excellent account of his life by J.R. Green, which is available online, was born in Auckland and studied at the University of Otago and then Trinity College at Cambridge, where he became a research scholar in 1933, before moving to Rome where he was for a time librarian at the British School, then returning to Trinity as a fellow of the college.

In 1939 he was appointed to the chair of Greek at the University of Sydney, succeeding Enoch Powell who had returned to England to enlist in the army; he also held the chair of archeology and was responsible for the Nicholson museum. In 1954 he moved to Canberra to become the first master of University House at the the Australian National University and, finally, in 1969 to Melbourne to become a research fellow at La Trobe University.

In the course of these years, Trendall pursued his scholarly work on the vases of southern Italy, producing an impressive series of volumes on the vases of Apulia (where the main centre of production was Taranto, the ancient Taras), Paestum (ancient Poseidonia) and southern Italy in general. Along the way he inspired many younger scholars and also, as it turns out, the collectors whose works are now on display at the Ian Potter Museum.

There are other fine things in the show as well, but the most important objects are Greek vases, including some Attic ones as well as a majority of southern Italian wares. But whether produced in Attica itself or in Apulia or Sicily, all these vases had specific uses and functions within the dinner parties that were a central part of ancient social life.

The world of the classical Greek city, the polis, was largely a public one. Private houses were relatively modest, conspicuous expenditure being confined to public buildings such as temples. The citizens met informally in the agora and formally in the ecclesia - the assembly - as well as in endless juries and commissions.

Complementing this public existence, as well as the private world of the home, was the intermediate domain of sociability represented by dinner parties or symposia; one of Plato's dialogues, the Symposium, takes place at such a gathering. They were held in dining rooms of private houses, where guests reclined on couches around a central space and food was served on portable tables.

There were conventions, although these were subject to variation: food was eaten first, then water was brought to wash hands and wine was served. Although food and wine seem to have been served together in the Homeric period, there is a formula in the Iliad and the Odyssey about the desire for food being sated, which marks the point at which conversation begins. The same principle applied in the classical symposium except that the drinking of wine accompanied the conversation and songs, recital of poems and other forms of entertainment.

Wine was virtually never served straight, and that is the first reason why we encounter such a variety of vase shapes, although shapes also evolve through time and vary in different cultural centres. Wine was mixed with water, often with much more water than wine, but in any case with the proportion of water usually increasing as the evening wore on and guests had had enough to drink; this was under the direction of the symposiarch, who was one of the guests elected to direct the course of the feast.

Thus there were vases for the wine and vases for pouring the water (oinochoai) and a large bowl for mixing the two, the krater, from which we derive our word for the mouth of a volcano. Then there were cups of various shapes for drinking the wine. All of these vessels were decorated with painted motifs, usually with episodes from mythology, although later, and especially in Apulia, also with what appear to be scenes from theatrical productions (also, of course, representing mythological figures).

Two of the most beautiful vases are from Attica, the greatest centre of ancient ceramics -- indeed Trendall noted that the southern Italian vases he chose to study were frequently treated with disdain because they were not as refined and sophisticated as earlier Attic wares; it is true that the Italian pots tend to be much more loosely painted, which at best can have a distinctive charm of its own.

One of these Attic vases is an amphora from the late Archaic period, about 540 to 530BC, when designs were executed in black figure; that is, as black silhouettes against the red body of the vase. It represents a bearded Dionysus with his attributes of vine and ivy leaves; it was usual to depict Dionysus with a beard in early times although in the Classical period he comes to be imagined as young and beardless - indeed almost as epicene - and eventually as a matching opposite to Apollo, the only god who from the outset was represented as eternally youthful.

The other Attic vase, also very impressive, is decorated one side with the rape of Cassandra and on the other with the scene of Peleus and Thetis handing the young Achilles over to the good centaur Chiron, who is to be his tutor. Among smaller vessels, there is a beautiful black-figure cup of about 540BC and a shallower, very elegant kylix from about 480 to 475BC, in the red-figure painting that succeeded the earlier black-figure style.

The Apulian vases belong to a later period, from about 430 to 300BC, when the Romans conquered Taras and brought the autonomy of Greek civilisation there to an end. As already mentioned, they are looser and more casual in their decorative style, while in form often becoming increasingly elaborate and even at times rather overworked, with long necks and complex volutes for handles.

Among the most beautiful of the Apulian vases, to take them in roughly chronological order, is a red-figure hydria, a water container. It is attributed to the Painter of the Berlin Dancing Girl: as is the convention with Renaissance painting too, anonymous artists are given the name of a particularly outstanding work that appears to be by the same hand and that serves as the reference point in attributing other works.

This hydria is close to contemporary Attic work and the painting is thought to reflect something of the style of Polygnotus, an important painter of the time but whose work, like almost all Greek painting apart from ceramic decoration, has been lost to us. It is painted with Apollo and, apparently, four of the nine Muses. The choice of subject is apt for a water container, for Apollo is among other things the god of poetic inspiration, which is symbolised by the Castalian spring - fresh water gushing from the slopes of Mount Parnassus.

Among the later Apulian forms there are increasingly elongated oinochoai, with long handles extended above the neck and lip, and almost extravagantly elaborate loutrophoroi, the vases used for pouring handwashing water, with complex handles on both sides. Completely different are the charming fish plates: circular plates with edges and raised on a short stem, decorated with fish designs and presumably used to serve something like a fritto misto, with a concavity in the centre for a dipping sauce.

The discovery of these vases is a story in itself, going back to the second half of the 18th century, with the beginning of a new approach to archeology both in theory, with the writings of Johann Winckelmann, and in practice, with the spread of archeological excavation in Italy, much of it funded by the wealthy British grand tourists of the day.

The most famous of the Englishmen associated with these ceramic wares is William Hamilton, whose young wife, Emma, entertained visitors with her classical stripteases and became the mistress of Horatio Nelson. Among various engravings hung in the gallery to complement the exhibition is a print after C.H. Kniep, Goethe's friend on the latter part of his Italian tour, showing the Hamiltons at the opening of a burial in 1790: a skeleton lies in the grave, surrounded by the vases he was buried with, presumably so he could continue to enjoy convivial dinner parties in the next world.

In an altogether less serious vein is a satirical print by James Gillray (1820) in which Hamilton, as a frail and pedantic connoisseur, admires some very dubious items of pseudo antiquity, including a bust of Emma as the ancient courtesan Lais; in the background we can make out pictures of Emma as Cleopatra, Nelson as Mark Antony, and Hamilton again as Claudius, in a frame adorned with a cuckold's horns. In the middle is a picture of an erupting Vesuvius, combining an allusion to Hamilton's work as a vulcanologist with a symbol that is as vividly sexual as it is archetypally romantic.

Treasures: Antiquities from Melbourne Private Collections
Ian Potter Museum, University of Melbourne, to April 15.