que purple and
white pigments, which follow certain conventional principles in their
respective use. After a third baking at a lower heat still to fix
these colours the vase was complete.

In the red-figured vases the shining black is used as a background.
But before it is applied the outlines of the figures are indicated not
by incised lines, but by drawing a thick line of black round their
contours. Recent researches have attempted to show that the instrument
with which this was achieved may have been a feather brush or pen, by
which the lines were drawn separately, not concurrently. The other
tools used for painting would be an ordinary metal or reed pen and a
camel's-hair brush, or at any rate something analogous. Thus the
outlines of the figures were clearly marked, and the process is one of
drawing rather than painting, but it was in draughtsmanship that the
best vase-painters excelled. The next stage was to mark the inner
details by very fine black lines or by masses of black for surfaces
such as the hair; white and purple were also employed, but more
sparingly than on the earlier vases. The main processes always remain
the same down to the termination of vase-painting, though the tendency
to polychromy, which came in about the end of the 5th century B.C.,
effected some modifications. The blacking of the whole exterior
surface--a purely mechanical process--took place after the figures had
been completed and protected from accidents by the thick black border
of which we have spoken.

A fragment of an unfinished vase preserved in the Sevres Museum gives
a very clear idea of the process just described, the figures being
completed, but the back ground not yet applied (fig. 18). There is
also another vase in existence which gives the interior of a
vase-painter's studio, in which three artists are at work with their
brushes, their paint-pots by their side.

[Illustration: (From a photo supplied by the Director of the Sevres
Museum)

FIG. 18.--Fragment of unfinished red-figured vase]

In the class of vases (3 (a)), with polychrome figures on a white
ground, the essential feature is the white slip or _engobe_ with which
the naturally pale clay is covered. In the archaic vases of the 7th
and 6th centuries B.C., especially in the Ionian centres, as at
Rhodes, Naucratis and Cyrene, this slip is frequently employed, but
with this, difference, t