Describe the development of Greek pictorial style as it evolves in vase painting. Begin with the Geometric period and continue through White Ground. You need not write in full sentences but you must provide dates, a description of its decoration, and why it is is called its style title.

Greek pottery, the pottery of the ancient Greeks, important both for the intrinsic beauty of its forms and decoration and for the light it sheds on the development of Greek pictorial art. It fired clay pottery is highly durable and few or no Greek works in wood, textile, or wall painting have survived the painted decoration of this pottery has become the main source of information about the process whereby Greek artists gradually solved the many problems of representing three-dimensional objects and figures on a flat or curved surface.

Explanation:

The earliest stylistic period is the Geometric, lasting from about 1000 to 700 BCE. This period is further broken down into a Proto-Geometric transition from Mycenaean forms. In this period the surface of the pot was completely covered with a network of fine patterns in which circles and arcs predominate. Athenian painters adopted this black-figure pottery style around 630 BCE but emphasized human figures rather than Oriental animal motifs as pictorial themes. Red-figure pottery, invented at Athens about 530 BCE, is just the reverse of the black-figure style in that the reddish figures appear light against the black background of the pot surface.

Greek pottery began to decline surprisingly early, in the mid-5th century BCE. Because of the inherent limitations of the curving pot surface, pottery painters could no longer compete with the rapid strides toward naturalism taken by painters of larger works such as wall paintings.