Cypriot Free-Field Art: One Bird on an Empty Jug

In 1948 Einar Gjerstad needed a name for a jug with almost nothing on it. Sorting the painted pottery of the Cypriot Iron Age for the Swedish Cyprus Expedition, he had already described three ways of laying out ornament: in horizontal zones, in panels, and the "plain-bodied" style, where the body was left bare between bands at the rim, neck and base. In White Painted III, late in the Cypro-Geometric period, he found a fourth. On jugs with a pinched rim, "on the free surface of the vase a single ornament is applied": a triangle filled with black and white chequers, a few isolated circles, a swastika [1]. He called it the free-field style.

The name outgrew its first object. By the late eighth century BC, painters in eastern Cyprus were putting a bird, a goat, a bull or a man holding a flower in the slot where the chequered triangle had been. John Boardman, reviewing the standard corpus in 1977, called the figured style "one of the most colourful and decorative styles of antiquity, almost non-Mediterranean in appearance", in a paragraph that opens by noting that "very little" Cypriot Iron Age pottery "is figure-decorated" [6].

Both halves of his paragraph hold. The free-field style was a minority practice, centred in a few eastern workshops, at its height for about a century and a half. Its defining feature is something the painter left out.

Figure style and free-field are two different things

Gjerstad's term describes a layout. Another term describes subject matter: "pictorial style", or style figuré, from the title of the corpus by Vassos Karageorghis and Jean des Gagniers, published in 1974 with a supplement in 1979 [5]. The two overlap on the famous jugs and are routinely confused. A pictorial vase can arrange its figures in bands and panels; a free-field vase can carry a single geometric ornament, as Gjerstad's first examples did. Boardman's complaint about the corpus was that it sorted the vases "by subject matter rather than date or style", grouping birds with birds and bulls with bulls, when the material "should be definable by studio and artist" [6]. Most work on the style since has been an attempt to answer him.

The clearest case of a figured vase that is not free-field is the Hubbard amphora in the Cyprus Museum. Wing-Commander O'Brien Hubbard rescued it from illicit diggers working the cemeteries of the Famagusta district, and Porphyrios Dikaios published it in 1937 [7]. On one side a woman sits on a throne and drinks through a long tube from a vessel set before her, while a second woman approaches with small jugs; behind the throne a winged sphinx sniffs a flower, and a bull's head appears beside the handle. On the other side men and women hold hands in a line of dancers, with a lyre player at the centre [7]. Gjerstad made it the type piece of a Bichrome III group whose figures, drawn in outline, show "a marked tendency to escape from the geometrical schema" [1]. Dikaios dated it to about 900 BC; it now sits late in the Cypro-Geometric period, in the ninth or eighth century BC. Its figures still walk round the pot in a continuous frieze, with bands above and below. The free-field jugs grew from the same freedom of drawing, applied to a different surface.

The grammar of an empty pot

By Bichrome IV, the ware of the Cypro-Archaic I period (c. 750 to 600 BC, with the start date fixed by J. N. Coldstream's cross-dating with Greek Geometric pottery [2]), Gjerstad's formula was settled: "The free-field style is generally employed on the jugs with pinched mouth, both for geometrical and pictorial designs, and the zone and panel-style on the other vases" [1]. The free-field jug is usually a trefoil-mouthed oinochoe, wheel-made, with a pale buff or greenish slip. The painter worked in two colours. The red is a natural ochre. The black is umber, a manganese-rich earth found around the copper-mining districts of the Troodos, and Eleni Aloupi-Siotis and Anna Lekka have shown why potters preferred it: manganese stays dark in an ordinary oxidising firing, so black and red could come out of the kiln together without careful control of the fire [13].

The main figure goes on the side opposite the handle. It is usually drawn in black outline and filled with red, and it is bent to the curve of the body. Around it the painter scattered small ornaments to balance the empty ground. Alicia Dissinger's count of Cypro-Archaic bird images shows how standard that kit was: a lotus appears beside the bird on 89 vessels, a swastika on 79, an arrow of stacked chevrons on 57 [10]. The pose was standard too. Of her catalogued birds, 215 hold the neck up and only 15 hold it down [10].

The jug beside this paragraph does without the fillers. A single bird strides to the right across the bare buff clay, its body a compass-drawn disc divided into wedges of chequer, hatching, concentric arcs and red, with a long red neck, a ringed eye and comb-like feet. A black band at the neck and a ladder on the handle are the only other paint. It is about as close as the style comes to Gjerstad's original definition, one ornament on a free surface, with the ornament now a bird. Its modern history, from an 1883 London sale through more than ninety years with the family of General Pitt-Rivers, has an article of its own.

Birds, goats, bulls and a man with a flower

Birds outnumber every other subject. Georgiadou and Dikomitou-Eliadou describe the Salaminian waterbirds as appearing "alone or in pairs, with lotus flowers, with a branch or catching a fish" [4, p. 343]. The bird with a lotus formed a group of its own: the Metropolitan Museum's Cesnola jug 74.51.503 belongs to a set of vases, its catalogue suggests, "probably painted in a single workshop" [3, no. 160].

Annie Caubet drew a useful distinction between the bird and the flower. The lotus, the Egyptian water-lily, reached Cypriot painters with the rest of a borrowed Levantine and Egyptian repertoire of palmettes, rosettes and sacred trees. The birds, she observed, seem to owe nothing to eastern models: they are everywhere on Cypriot vases and almost absent from the carved ivory reliefs that carried much of the borrowed repertoire [8].

Caubet also noticed how the painters built their animals. Bird and fish start from the same pointed oval, quartered with red and hatching; legs and a beak make one, fins make the other [8]. The small jug beside this paragraph shows the bird catching a fish, one of the standard compositions. A hatched waterfowl stretches its neck across the whole shoulder in tight S-bends and drops its beak toward a dark fish with a forked tail. Neither animal can be named to species. A Cesnola jug in New York (74.51.527) shows the same encounter, and its catalogue suggests a Nilotic source adapted to Cypriot taste [3, no. 161].

Quadrupeds come next. A wild goat stands in black silhouette on the White Painted IV jug beside this paragraph, horns swept back, beside a larger composite figure with a ladder-like stem, a fan of feathery leaves and comb-like pendants, most simply read as a stylised tree. Lesley Bushnell traces the goat-and-tree scheme from the Middle Bronze Age into the Iron Age, where it appears in highly stylised form on Bichrome IV pottery; where most regions used it only briefly, Cyprus kept it for well over a thousand years [9]. Bulls lower their heads to smell a lotus. Stags stand before plants, sometimes with an archer drawing on them, as on a jug in the Cyprus Museum that Karageorghis and des Gagniers catalogue among their human scenes [5].

People are rarer. The best-known human subject is a figure raising a lotus to the face, as if to smell it. On the Cesnola jug 74.51.509, said to be from Golgoi or Kition, two robed figures and two birds flank a central lotus. Karageorghis judged its painter "able and ambitious", the composition "strictly symmetrical, demonstrating perfection in figural drawing but producing a rather static decorative composition" [3, no. 157]. It reads like a coat of arms.

Why the jugs tell no stories

That stillness runs through the whole style. Maria Iacovou has shown that the pictorial pottery of Late Bronze Age Cyprus "remained predominantly decorative and emblematic" and passed that habit to the pictorial pottery of the eleventh and tenth centuries BC: "neither can claim a coherent narrative style" [11]. The free-field jugs keep to the habit. One figure on an empty ground is closer to a sign than a scene, and where several figures appear they tend to line up as a row of attributes. Greek vase painters built up a stock of mythological scenes in which a single figure could call up a whole story. No myth has been convincingly identified on a free-field jug.

The catalogues are candid about it. On a Cesnola jug (74.51.539) a small figure runs along the back of a horse; Karageorghis allows that the odd pose may reflect "the painter's inability to position the rider's body correctly. Or it may simply reflect the painter's sense of humor" [3, no. 153].

The warriors, horsemen and chariots raise the sharpest dispute. In 1974 Karageorghis and des Gagniers argued that such themes had been almost unknown in Cypriot vase painting until the Assyrian warrior-kings "brought new fashions to the island", their bronze-fitted chariots, like those buried at Salamis, impressing the artists [12][5]. The idea lives on in museum labels. The Metropolitan Museum's entry for the jug beside this paragraph, a winged quadruped with small hooves and a human face, traces it to composite creatures on Near Eastern seals and calls such influence "particularly likely" during Assyrian control of the island [14].

Andres Reyes took the argument apart in 1994. He noted that no Assyrian palace wares, palaces or forts had been reported from Cyprus, and that "Gjerstad himself saw no evidence for the direct transmission of Assyrian motifs into the iconographic repertoire used to decorate Cypriot ceramics" [12]. The chariots buried at Salamis differ from those on Assyrian reliefs, and chariot scenes already appear on earlier Cypriot pictorial pottery. Where the kings of Salamis owned objects like those found at Nimrud, Reyes reads it as shared taste: Cypriot and Assyrian rulers probably bought from the same workshops in Syria and Phoenicia [12]. Most scholars now follow him, while allowing that Assyrian elements did reach the island at second hand.

Salamis, Amathus and the painters with invented names

Gjerstad split the island in two. Western painters, in the country of Marion and Lapithos, favoured concentric circles; eastern painters favoured lotus flowers, rosettes, animals and people [1]. Karageorghis suggested that jugs like the bird-and-fish group came from one or two workshops in the east [3, no. 161]. Recent work keeps the direction and drops the number. Georgiadou and Dikomitou-Eliadou, working through about 1,100 vessels from Salamis and its hinterland, conclude that the pictorial style "was conceived and developed in the workshops of Salamis", with Amathus "the only other contemporary production centre where a pictorial style developed" [4, pp. 337, 341]. They date the free-field mode to the beginning of the Cypro-Archaic, after pictorial panels and before the dense floral style, all three overlapping [4, p. 342]. The same floral ornament appears on the painted corselets of Salaminian terracotta statues, as if potters and figurine makers shared workshops [4, pp. 341-342].

Boardman himself noted that J. L. Benson had gone some way toward it with the bird types [6]. Benson, trained on Greek Geometric pottery, applied Beazley's method of attributing vases to individual hands. He defined a Nicosia Bichrome Bowl workshop, which he placed around Tamassos in the centre of the island, and inside it named individual painters such as the Armidale Painter [12][10]. The names are useful handles. They are also mostly untested, and the evidence beneath them is thin. Of the 734 Cypro-Archaic bird images in Dissinger's catalogue, fewer than half have any recorded context, and she knows of a detailed provenance for only one vase, assigned to the Kourion-Amathus region by style alone [10]. Style places the pot in a workshop, and the workshop is then located by the pots.

Found in tombs, kept at home

Almost every complete free-field jug survives because someone put it in a grave. Many were dug in the nineteenth century without record. The Metropolitan Museum's jugs belong to the collection of Luigi Palma di Cesnola, American consul on Cyprus, bought by subscription in 1874 to 1876 [3]; their find-spots read "said to be from Ormidhia" or "said to be from Kition", a dealer's attribution with little behind it. The Drakopoulos jugs are no exception. The goat jug has no known find-spot, and the striding bird first surfaces in an 1881 album of finds made by Luigi's brother Alessandro.

The display jugs also stayed on the island. Gjerstad listed the Cypriot pottery found in Greece and the West, at Rhodes, Delos, Crete, Sicily, Sardinia and elsewhere, and what travelled was small juglets and jugs with encircling lines, concentric circles and at most a simplified lotus [1]. The figured jug was made for Cypriot buyers and, for the most part, Cypriot tombs.

One claim runs the other way. Fikellura, an East Greek painted ware of the sixth century BC, reached Amathus, Marion, Paphos and Salamis in small amounts, and Reyes notes that "it may also be argued" that some Fikellura figure decoration derives from the Cypriot free-field style [12]. He offers it as a possibility, and it remains one.

When the field filled in

In Cypro-Archaic II, from about 600 BC, the bare ground disappears. Gjerstad saw in Bichrome V "the beginning of the decadence of the painted wares", the eastern lotus multiplying until it covered the whole vase [1]. On the south coast Amathus developed its own crowded manner, the Amathus style, which Sabine Fourrier has studied from a deposit beside the town's north rampart [15]. Boardman was blunt about it: in the Amathus style "the decorative flair of the Cypriot painter finally expires with his attempt to compromise with the techniques and subject matter of Greek black figure" [6]. Attic pottery arrived in growing quantities through the sixth century, at Marion, Amathus, Kition and Salamis [12].

A small amphoriskos from a tomb near the acropolis of Amathus, dated about 520 BC, shows where the figures went. Six people gather among stylised trees. Some recline on pillows holding Greek-style cups; others offer drinks or play the double flute [16]. Catherine Kearns, following Fourrier, reads the vessel as an imitation of East Greek pots made in a Cypriot manner [16]. It is a feast again, set among trees, like the one on the Hubbard amphora more than two centuries earlier. Birds rest among the branches over the drinkers' heads.

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