Pithos painter

The Pithos painter was a vase painter of the Attic - red-figure style. He worked in the period from 500 to 480 BC. The designation as a pithos painter (a so-called emergency name ) goes back to the frequency with which a storage vessel sunk into the ground, a so-called pithos , appears in his pictures.

The Pithos painter specialized in the decoration of small-format drinking bowls , which he painted in a characteristic, fleeting style exclusively on the inside of the bowl (the so-called tondo ). The thematic range of these images is relatively limited; Mostly they show a single person (often a young man, a hoplite , a satyr or a Scythian who is recognizable by his costume ), who crouches at a drinking bout or is busy with a large vessel, such as a crater or a pithos power.

The extraordinary fleetingness of many of his pictures is remarkable, which is particularly striking in an extensive series of bowls that show a crouching Scythian from behind, often supplemented by a drinking horn . The composition, which is quite demanding in terms of composition, usually consists of little more than a single blob-like outline, which is supplemented by quickly thrown lines and a few details (such as a punctiform eye). This obviously deliberate negligence stands in radical contrast to the accuracy of drawing and attention to detail of his close contemporaries, the so-called pioneers of red-figure vase painting in Athens.

Despite the very idiosyncratic stylistic forms, the products of the Pithos painter were traded in the Mediterranean region to a similar extent as other products of the Athenian pottery workshops. An extreme example is a particularly highly abstracting bowl by the painter that was found in the Thames - however, it cannot be proven whether it came there in antiquity or not until the 19th century.

literature

• John D. Beazley : Attic Red-figure Vase-painters. 2nd edition. Oxford 1963, pp. 139-141
• François Lissarrague : Le peintre du Pithos ou l'image illisible. In: Giovanni Rizza (Ed.): I vasi Attici ed altre ceramiche coeve in Sicilia. Volume 1. Centro di studio sull'archeologia greca, Catania 1996, pp. 99-105.
• Dimitris Paleothodoros: The Pithos painter. In: Eulimene. Volume 4, 2003, pp. 62-75.
• Richard Bradley, Amy C. Smith : Questions of Context: A Greek Cup from the River Thames. In: Chris Gosden u. a. (Ed.): Communities and Connections. Essays in Honor of Barry Cunliffe. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2007, pp. 30-42.

Web links

Two bowls by the Pithos Painter, which are now in the Ure Museum of Greek Archeology ( website ) at the University of Reading , are shown here and here , in the second case (the above-mentioned bowl from the Thames) the interior image, which is difficult to recognize, is significant on the head.