BRIAN SPARKES (1991: ch. 4) has taught us that the shape of a pot matters. It matters not just because different pots offer different fields and different constraints to the artist, but because different shapes are used, handled and seen differently. This has been most fruitfully explored with regard to those vessels used at the symposion, and particularly by François Lissarrague in his Un Flot d’images (1987). It is clear that the images on sympotic vessels exploited the conditions in which they were seen in a variety of ways: shape and imagery could be made to interact closely, as on the Bomford cup where the user has to decide whether to enjoy the slippering of the slave boy on the tondo while grasping the male genitals that are the cup's foot, or whether to use the outer handles (no mean feat on a cup this large) and cock the foot at the other symposiasts. Certain types of scene were painted only for locations in which they would normally be displayed not to the collective gathering but to the individual (so the scenes on Douris’ psykter in the British Museum); other scenes relied for their effect on the gradual uncovering which occurred as a cup was drained (it is not by chance that the vomiting reveller features primarily on the tondos of cups).

As well as relating the scenes shown to the way a vessel was seen and handled, recent studies have made much more of the interrelationship between different scenes on a pot. Sometimes this relationship is more or less transparent, as when three scenes relating to the same story are shown on the two sides and interior of a cup. Sometimes the parallels are ‘typological’, with parallel scenes shown on two sides of an amphora, or whatever. Except when it comes to ‘lay figures’ on the ‘backs’ of classical red-figure vases, cases where we can be confident that scenes are quite unconnected are rather rarer than the long ignoring of the possibility of linkages would suggest.

If the study of pot painting has increasingly paid attention to the way in which images relate to each other and to a pot's shape and use, the same does not apply to the study of sculpture.