Wild Goat Style

The Wild Goat Style (variously capitalized and hyphenated) is a modern term describing vase painting produced in the east of Greece, namely the southern and eastern Ionian islands, between . Examples have been found notably at the sites in Chios, at Miletus and in Rhodes. The style owes its name to the predominant motif found on such vases: friezes of goats. The style developed the technique introduced during the Orientalizing Period of rendering the heads of figures in outline by applying it to the whole of a figure. Thus where previously an image was a silhouette, the Wild Goat Style allowed a greater representation of detail and marked a step forward in the progress towards naturalism.
Goats are not the only creatures depicted on such vases; in common with other Orientalizing pottery, hares, lions, hounds, griffins and sphinxes are also to be found along with favoured in-filling devices like intertwining lines and dots or a checker pattern. The variety of ornamentation makes a careful distinction of a number of phases in the development of the style possible which in turn has been used to date the founding of Greek colonies in the Levant and North Africa.