Excerpt from White Athenian Vases in the British Museum<br><br>But the painters of lekythi, though they owed their technical methods in a large measure, and certainly their best inspiration, to the fresco-painters, were at the same time subject to other influences. They had as contemporaries in Athens, and in one sense as rivals, the sculptors of marble stelae, which served as tombstones. The province of the sculptor of stelae, at this particular period, was to illustrate in bas-relief parting scenes between the deceased and his or her relations, groups in which the status in life of the deceased was indicated, as where a woman is seated with a jewel-box in her hands and a maid standing before her; or where a woman holds up a doll, to show that the deceased had been only an infant; or, again, groups in which the immediate cause of death is suggested rather than represented, as where a maid holding an infant in swaddling clothes before a seated woman suggests that the woman had died in child-birth; or where a young horseman, like Dexileos, who fell in a battle at Corinth, is seen striking down an enemy. These are the usual types of the stelae. In their subjects they stop short just before the death of the person whom they commemorate. They are almost as abundant in Athens as are the white lekythi, with which they were contemporaneous; and while a limited number of them are of the greatest artistic refinement and excellence, the greater proportion are commonplace. That is also true of the lekythi.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.