<P> Throughout these places, various types and shapes of vases were used . Not all were purely utilitarian; large Geometric amphorae were used as grave markers, kraters in Apulia served as tomb offerings and Panathenaic Amphorae seem to have been looked on partly as objets d'art, as were later terracotta figurines . Some were highly decorative and meant for elite consumption and domestic beautification as much as serving a storage or other function, such as the krater with its usual use in diluting wine . </P> <P> Earlier Greek styles of pottery, called "Aegean" rather than "Ancient Greek", include Minoan pottery, very sophisticated by its final stages, Cycladic pottery, Minyan ware and then Mycenaean pottery in the Bronze Age, followed by the cultural disruption of the Greek Dark Age . As the culture recovered Sub-Mycenaean pottery finally blended into the Protogeometric style, which begins Ancient Greek pottery proper . </P> <P> The rise of vase painting saw increasing decoration . Geometric art in Greek pottery was contiguous with the late Dark Age and early Archaic Greece, which saw the rise of the Orientalizing period . The pottery produced in Archaic and Classical Greece included at first black - figure pottery, yet other styles emerged such as red - figure pottery and the white ground technique . Styles such as West Slope Ware were characteristic of the subsequent Hellenistic period, which saw vase painting's decline . </P> <P> Interest in Greek art lagged behind the revival of classical scholarship during the Renaissance and revived in the academic circle round Nicholas Poussin in Rome in the 1630s . Though modest collections of vases recovered from ancient tombs in Italy were made in the 15th and 16th centuries these were regarded as Etruscan . It is possible that Lorenzo de Medici bought several Attic vases directly from Greece; however the connection between them and the examples excavated in central Italy was not made until much later . Winckelmann's Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums of 1764 first refuted the Etruscan origin of what we now know to be Greek pottery yet Sir William Hamilton's two collections, one lost at sea the other now in the British Museum, were still published as "Etruscan vases"; it would take until 1837 with Stackelberg's Gräber der Hellenen to conclusively end the controversy . </P>

What types of designs were painted on early greek vases