Vol. 159 / No. 1372
Vol. 159 / No. 1372
FIGURE-DECORATED POTTERY, produced in great quantity in Athens and other centres during antiquity, constitutes one of the most challenging areas of study for scholars of Classical art and archaeology.1 The black and red-figure examples provide the largest surviving corpus of visual material from the ancient Greek world. Although vase imagery supplies abundant information about
mythology, athletes, women, drinking
parties and religious rituals, and vase
shapes indicate particular functions
such as mixing, pouring, drinking and
storage, rather less is known about the
workshops that created these often extraordinarily
beautiful forms or the artists who
decorated them with varying degrees of success.
Sir John Beazley (1885–1970), the Oxford scholar who classified and attributed many hundreds of Athenian vases, assigned ‘names’ to unsigned works based on a
particular vessel’s location,
iconography or other factors.2 Since
Beazley first identified the Berlin
Painter (initially called ‘The Master of
the Berlin Amphora’) in 1911, the number
of works assigned to this red-figure vase painter now totals more than three hundred.3 Interest in the painter’s ‘elegant,
approachable style has never lessened’,
and includes publications devoted to
individual vases, to associations
between the Berlin Painter and other
artists and to Beazley’s own drawings of
the figures on the vases.4
The exhibition The Berlin Painter and his World: Athenian
Vase-Painting in the Early Fifth Century B.C., shown first at Princeton
University Art Museum (closed 11th June), where this reviewer saw it, and
opening this month at the Toledo Museum of Art (7th July to 1st October), was
organised by J. Michael Padgett. It is the first exhibition ever to examine the
painter’s oeuvre. Bringing together a total of eighty-four objects, including
fifty four vases attributed to the painter and a handful of bronze and
terracotta figurines, the exhibition and accompanying catalogue use objects and
images to situate the artist within the historical, political and social
climate of his day. Like his contemporary and possible rival, the Kleophrades
Painter (Beazley’s ‘painter of power’), who collaborated with a potter named
‘Kleophrades’, the real name of the Berlin Painter (Beazley’s ‘painter of
grace’) remains a mystery. Nonetheless, there is a great deal to be gleaned
about him from careful observation of the vases themselves. As a ‘pot painter’
who specialised in decorating vessel shapes other than cups – among them
amphorae (for wine storage), kraters (for mixing wine with water), psykters (wine-coolers)
and lekythoi (oil containers often associated with mortuary practices) – his
long career extended from c.505 to the 460s BC.
Beazley and others have isolated the ‘early’, ‘middle’ and
‘late’ phases of his output, and the painter’s most skillful and innovative pieces
are thought to belong to the earlier stages of his career. Subjects range from
the Olympian gods and goddesses, such as those assembled round a dinos (a
cauldron-shaped vessel) of c.485–475 BC to witness the departure of Zeus (cat.
no.39; Fig.81), to heroes, athletes, musicians and episodes related to the
Trojan War. Vases by the Berlin Painter have been discovered in Athens
(primarily on the Acropolis), elsewhere on the Greek mainland, and at a number
of ancient sites across Italy. It may surprise some to learn, according to
David Saunders in his catalogue essay, ‘The Distribution of the Berlin
Painter’s Vases’, that ‘shape repeatedly appears to have been the most
important factor for the distribution of the Berlin Painter’s vases’.5 Also
unexpected, yet quite noticeable among the vases on view, are more than a
handful that appear to have sustained some sort of damage over time or were
fired incorrectly in antiquity. Most, if not all, of the best works attributed
to the painter are included in the exhibition, with significant loans from collections
across Europe and the United States. Each vase has been splendidly illustrated from
multiple views in the catalogue. At Princeton, the exhibition filled two rooms
painted Wedgwood blue, and visitors were confronted at the entrance with the painter’s
‘name vase’ – a large amphora (81.5 cm. high) discovered in the ancient
Etruscan town of Vulci in 1834 and dated to c.500 BC (no.4; Fig.80). The vase
is decorated on both sides with satyrs, the hybrid followers of Dionysos,
wielding musical instruments. The satyrs’ names are inscribed: Oreimachos (‘mountain
fighter’) and Orochares (‘rejoicing in mountains’), and the former is
gracefully posed with Hermes and a fawn. In the same gallery was a slightly
smaller red-figure amphora portraying Athena on one side and Herakles on the
other (no.5). The large scale of these two vases is striking, especially in
relation to the many others that were on show in the same space, such as the
41.5 cm. high Citharode from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (no.15).
Also exceptional is the vast range of different shapes chosen for embellishment
by this painter and the care with which so many of them are decorated. Consider
the hydria from Vienna (no.33; Fig.82) on which Apollo and Artemis stand either
side of a burning altar; their bodies, and even the fiery flame, gently follow
the natural curvature of the vessel – a sophisticated pairing of pottery form
and painted image. The wall-texts were composed with a non-specialist audience
in mind, and covered everything from techniques of potting and painting and the
connoisseurship and attribution of Greek vases to ancient life, trade and
distribution, and mythological figures.
In keeping with Late Archaic and Early Classical Greek art,
including large-scale sculpture, the Berlin Painter seems highly concerned with
details of anatomy, drapery and movement. There are, however, two
characteristics that set him apart from the other painters highlighted in the
exhibition. The first is that his compositions feature an individual figure (or
group of figures) set against an austere all-black background on each side of
the same vase. Such ‘spotlit’ figures, as they are often described, may be lightly
framed in red, placed atop a simple ornamental ground-line, or suspended
unframed within the available space. The second characteristic of the painter
is the tendency to connect solo figures on opposite sides of a single vessel in
obvious or not-so-obvious ways. For example, Perseus pursues the Gorgon Medusa
on an amphora of Panathenaiac shape (no.9); Zeus armed with a thunderbolt fights
a helmeted giant (perhaps Poryphyrion) holding a shield and spear (no.37) on
the sides of a neck-amphora and Zeus chases Ganymede around the surface of a
bell-krater (Fig.83). The vases in both galleries were well lit from above, to
maximise viewing and minimise the glare caused by the black gloss surfaces; and
in nearly every instance the objects were displayed with both sides clearly
visible, enabling the viewer to observe their pictorial unity.
Despite all that may be discerned from the vases themselves,
questions remain that are difficult to answer. Was the Berlin Painter one
person or several? Was he (if he was in fact a he) a potter as well as a
painter? Did the painter oversee the firing of his vessels after investing such
careful attention in decorating them? Was the painter literate, and capable of adding
the inscriptions? Why was the painter so drawn to particular figures and
subjects in addition to those already mentioned, among them animals, religious
settings and Nike (the personification of Victory), to the near or complete
exclusion of others? The catalogue accompanying the exhibition, whose contributors
include many luminaries of the field, goes a long way towards answering these
and many other questions, based on the surviving evidence. But to what extent ancient
Athenian vases and their painters reflect the priorities of contemporary
society, the specific tastes of buyers and consumers at home and abroad, or the
artistic preferences of the painters themselves, may well be questions that
will forever stay unanswered.
1 Catalogue: The Berlin Painter and his World: Athenian Vase-Painting
in the Early Fifth Century B.C. Edited by J. Michael Padgett. 448 pp. incl. 348
col. + 18 b. & w. ills. (Princeton University Art Museum and Yale University
Press, New Haven and London, 2017), £50. ISBN 978–0–300–22593–8.
2 J.H. Oakley: The Greek Vase: Art of the Storyteller, London
2013, pp.27–29.
3 J.D. Beazley: ‘The Master of the Berlin Amphora’, Journal
of Hellenic Studies 31 (1911), pp.276–95.
4 Padgett, op cit. (note 1), p.x; D.C. Kurtz, ed.: The Berlin
Painter: Drawings by Sir John Beazley, Oxford 1983.
5 D. Saunders, in Padgett, op. cit. (note 1), p.124.