Penthesilea painter

Penthesilea bowl in Munich

The Penthesilea painter (active between 470 and 450 BC in Athens ) was a Greek vase painter of Attic red-figure vase painting who is not known by name today . It received its emergency name after the bowl 2688 in the Munich Collection of Antiquities, on the inside of which the killing of Penthesilea by Achilles is shown. Based on this work, Sir John Beazley ascribes 177 vessels that are still preserved today, of which around 100 are only preserved as fragments. With 149 works, bowls take up the majority of the surviving work. The rest is mainly divided into small vessels such as skyphoi, kantharoi and double discs.

The Penthesilea painter was characterized by large, surface-filling figures that only find space on the painting surface through their posture. As a result, the edges are often decorated only narrowly. In addition, his works are characterized by their high level of color, which also allow numerous nuances. In addition to dark coral red and light red, he also used brownish colors, yellow, mixtures of yellow and white, and gold. The figures themselves are painted in great detail and worked extremely well down to the smallest element. In contrast to most other painters, he seems to have painted the secondary and external pictures himself in most of his works. An exception is in the very early bowl T 212 in the Museo Archeologico Nationale in Ferrara , the exterior pictures of which are assigned to the Splanchnoptes painter . The handwritten secondary images are dominated by depictions of boys and young people playing sports, teaching scenes, weapons and armor, and people talking to horses. Although he also painted mythological motifs there from time to time, these are so rare that they must have been an exception in his work. In the period that followed, his main subjects were increasingly dominated by everyday scenes, to which he gave ever greater space.

In his later works his attention to detail is lost more and more and gives way to stencil-like painted motifs that hardly differ in their basic composition from the typical mass-produced goods. His line becomes more and more fleeting, but still shows great security and thus gives the works a charm of their own, which also identifies him as one of the great masters of Greek vase painting with these works. His greatest mastery shifted more and more to the depictions of boys in the secondary pictures, which he probably now focused on.

His main meaning for the antique vase painting is that he moved more and more away from the usual classical motifs by mixing them more and more often with typical everyday motifs. By focusing more on the human, he treaded interesting new paths that made his importance for the advancement of Greek vase painting.

In addition to the Penthesilea bowl, bowl 2689 , also located in Munich , whose interior depicts the killing of Tityo by Apollo, is considered to be the main work of the Penthesilea painter.

Selected Works

• Berlin, Collection of Antiquities

Bowl-Skyphos F 2591 • Fragment of a Syphos 31573, V. 162

• Bologna, Museo Civico

Fragment of a crater 289 • Shell PU 272

• Boston, Museum of Fine Arts

Skyphos 01.8032 • Bowl 03.815 • Bowl 13.84 • Bowl 28.48

• Cambridge, Harvard University Art Museums

Kylix 1925.30.130

• Ferrara, Museo Archeologico Nationale

Bowl T 18 C • Bowl T 212

• Hamburg, Museum for Arts and Crafts

Bowl 1900.164

• London, The British Museum

Bowl E 72

• Madison, Elvehjem Museum of Art

Kylix 1976.31

• Munich, Glyptothek and Antikensammlung

Kantharos 2565 • Bowl 2688 • Bowl 2689

• New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Skyphos 06.1079 • Pyxis 07.286.36 • Double pane 29.167 • Bowl 41.162.9

• Oxford, Ashmolean Museum

Bowl 1931.12

• Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale (Cabinet des Médailles)

Shell 814

• Paris, Musee National du Louvre

Bowl G 382 • Bowl G 448

• Philadelphia, University Museum

Hydria L-64-41 • Kylix L-637-1a & b • Kylix MS 2495 • Kylix MS 5693

• Vienna, Art History Museum

Bowl 3700

literature

• Hans Diepolder : The Penthesilea Painter . Leipzig 1936. ( Research on ancient ceramics, Series I: Pictures of Greek Vases. Volume 10)
• John D. Beazley : Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters , Oxford 1963

Web links

Commons : Penthesilea Painter  - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files

• Vases by the Penthesilea Painter at Perseus Project