Chapter 5 Collaborative Investigations into the Production of Athenian Pottery
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Abstract
The processes by which Athenian black- and red-figure vases were produced appear to be well understood, with text-books regularly offering succinct descriptions of levigation, the application of relief line, and the three-stage firing process. A number of aspects, however, remain hypothetical, and new analytical techniques can inform old questions. In 2011, with funding from the National Science Foundation, the Getty Conservation Institute and J. Paul Getty Museum undertook a project to characterize Athenian black gloss. By partnering with The Aerospace Corporation, the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL), and The Northwestern University/Art Institute of Chicago Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts (NU-ACCESS), we created a team which had a diverse range of interests and equipment, with a view to obtaining new and rigorously-tested data. Combining these analyses with replication studies, we documented the ways in which black gloss responded during firing. Some of the results have been published in scientific journals, but in order to share them more broadly, we present here a summary of three case-studies. Taken together, they indicate that the production of the vases may be more complex than the conventional notion of a single three-stage firing process (oxidation-reduction-oxidation) suggests.