Revolution or Evolution? Reassessing the Relationship between Vase and Free Painting after 480 BCE

What is it about?

The large-scale pictorial cycles realized after 480 are believed to represent an indisputable model for the vase painters’ generation who shaped the Early Classical style. The iconographic choices and stylistic accomplishments of vase painters such as the Pistoxenos, Penthesilea, and Niobid Painters are punctually traced back to developments in wall/panel painting and to the achievements credited by literary sources to artists like Polygnotus of Thasos. Challenging this assumption, this paper aims to re-examine the direct relationship between the two media after 480 BCE. Firstly, a comparative analysis between literary and archaeological evidence is provided, bridging the gap between Early Classical and Late Archaic vase painting. In the second section, the development of pictorial art as outlined in literary sources is discussed, so as to comprehend whether ancient authors actually identify a sharp caesura around 480. As a result, the value of 480 as a watershed moment, both in ceramic and large-scale painting production, needs to be abandoned and a model of transition between Archaic and Classical age, with less marked but more realistic boundaries, is proposed instead.

Featured Image

Photo by Sam Szuchan on Unsplash

Photo by Sam Szuchan on Unsplash

Why is it important?

A new paradigm is proposed in terms of artistic change and development of different solutions within the Athenian kerameikos.