The Penthesilea Painter was a Greek vase painter of the Attic

Attica

Attica is a historical region of Greece, containing Athens, the current capital of Greece. The historical region is centered on the Attic peninsula, which projects into the Aegean Sea...

 red-figure

Red-figure pottery

Red-figure vase painting is one of the most important styles of figural Greek vase painting. It developed in Athens around 530 BC and remained in use until the late 3rd century BC. It replaced the previously dominant style of Black-figure vase painting within a few decades...

 style. His true name is unknown. His conventional name is derived from his name vase

Name vase

In classical archaeology, a name vase is a specific "vase" whose painter's name is unknown but whose workshop style has been identified. The painter is conventionally named after the selected "name vase" that embodies his characteristic style, or for one of its distinctive painted subjects, or for...

, "bowl 2688" in Munich, the inside of which depicts the slaying of Penthesilea

Penthesilea

Penthesilea or Penthesileia was an Amazonian queen in Greek mythology, the daughter of Ares and Otrera and the sister of Hippolyta, Antiope and Melanippe...

 by Achilles

Achilles

In Greek mythology, Achilles was a Greek hero of the Trojan War, the central character and the greatest warrior of Homer's Iliad.Plato named Achilles the handsomest of the heroes assembled against Troy....

. On the basis of that work, John Beazley

John Beazley

Sir John Davidson Beazley was an English classical scholar.Born in Glasgow, Scotland, Beazley attended Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a close friend of the poet James Elroy Flecker. After graduating in 1907, Beazley was a student and tutor in Classics at Christ Church, and in 1925 he...

 attributed 177 known vases to the painter, about 100 of which only survive fragmentarily. Bowls, 149 in number, represent the bulk of his work. The rest is distributed among small shapes like skyphoi

Skyphos

In classifying the pottery of Ancient Greece, a skyphos is a two-handled deep wine-cup on a low flanged base or none. The handles may be horizontal ear-shaped thumbholds that project from the rim , or they may be loop handles at the rim or that stand away from the lower part of the body...

, kantharoi

Kantharos

A kantharos or cantharus is a type of Greek pottery used for drinking. It is characterized by its high swung handles which extend above the lip of the pot.The god Dionysus had a kantharos which was never empty....

and bobbin

Bobbin

A bobbin is a spindle or cylinder, with or without flanges, on which wire, yarn, thread or film is wound. Bobbins are typically found in sewing machines, cameras, and within electronic equipment....

s.

His work is characterised by large, space-filling figures whose posture is often bent so as to permit them to fit on a vessel. For the same reason, ornamental decoration around the edges is often very narrow. His works are also characterised by being very colourful, permitting several intermediate shades. Apart from dark coral red and the usual light red, he also used tones of brown, yellow, yellow-white and gold. His figures are painted remarkably meticulously in every detail. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he appears to have painted the subsidiary or exterior images on his vases himself. An exception is his very early "bowl T 212" at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Ferrara

Ferrara

Ferrara is a city and comune in Emilia-Romagna, northern Italy, capital city of the Province of Ferrara. It is situated 50 km north-northeast of Bologna, on the Po di Volano, a branch channel of the main stream of the Po River, located 5 km north...

, with exterior images by the Splanchnoptes Painter. The Penthesilea Painter's works are dominated by depictions of boys and youths engaged in athletic activity, teaching scenes, weaponry and armour, as well as scenes of people talking to horses. While he painted the occasional mythological motif, they are so rare that they should be considered an exception among his work. Throughout his career, scenes from everyday life gain an increasingly dominant share of his paintings.

In his later works, his love of detail is lost and replaced with stencil-like motifs, their basic compositions indistinguishable from typical mass-produced wares. His lines become more casual, but don't lose their certainty, so that even these works preserve a distinctive charm, marking him as one of the great masters of Greek vase painting. His true mastery is increasingly found in the subsidiary images of boys, on which he appears to have concentrated more and more.

His major importance for Classical vase painting lies in the fact that he moved away from the usual motifs and replaced them with typical motifs from everyday life. His emphasis on human aspects represented a new departure and was to be an important influence on the further development of vase painting.

Apart from the Penthesilea bowl, "bowl 2689", also in Munich, is considered his other masterpiece. Its interior shows the slaying of Tityos

Tityos

Tityos was a giant from Greek mythology.-Story:Tityos was the son of Elara; his father was Zeus. Zeus hid Elara from his wife, Hera, by placing her deep beneath the earth. Tityos grew so large that he split his mother's womb, and was carried to term by Gaia, the Earth. Once grown, Tityos...

 by Apollo

Apollo

Apollo is one of the most important and complex of the Olympian deities in Greek and Roman mythology...

.

Selected works

• Berlin, Antikensammlung
  Antikensammlung Berlin
  The Antikensammlung Berlin is one of the most important collections of classical art in the world, now held in the Altes Museum and Pergamon Museum in Berlin, Germany. It contains thousands of ancient archaeological artefacts from the ancient Greek, Roman, Etruscan and Cypriot civilizations...
  
  

bowl skyphos F 2591• fragment of a skyphos 31573, V. 162

• Bologna
  Bologna
  Bologna is the capital city of Emilia-Romagna, in the Po Valley of Northern Italy. The city lies between the Po River and the Apennine Mountains, more specifically, between the Reno River and the Savena River. Bologna is a lively and cosmopolitan Italian college city, with spectacular history,...
  
  , Museo Civico

fragment of a krater 289 • bowl PU 272

• Boston
  Boston
  Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
  
  , Museum of Fine Arts
  Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
  The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, is one of the largest museums in the United States, attracting over one million visitors a year. It contains over 450,000 works of art, making it one of the most comprehensive collections in the Americas...
  
  

skyphos 01.8032 • bowl 03.815 • bowl 13.84 • bowl 28.48

• Cambridge, Massachusetts
  Cambridge, Massachusetts
  Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...
  
  , Harvard University Art Museums
  Harvard University Art Museums
  The Harvard Art Museums, part of Harvard University, comprise three museums and four research centers .The Harvard Art Museums...
  
  

kylix 1925.30.130

• Ferrara
  Ferrara
  Ferrara is a city and comune in Emilia-Romagna, northern Italy, capital city of the Province of Ferrara. It is situated 50 km north-northeast of Bologna, on the Po di Volano, a branch channel of the main stream of the Po River, located 5 km north...
  
  , Museo Archeologico Nazionale

bowl T 18 C • bowl T 212

• Hamburg
  Hamburg
  -History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...
  
  , Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe
  Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
  The Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe is a museum of fine, applied and decorative arts in Hamburg, Germany. It is located centrally, near the Hauptbahnhof.-History:...
  
  

bowl 1900.164

• London, British Museum
  British Museum
  The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...
  
  

bowl E 72

• Madison, Wisconsin
  Madison, Wisconsin
  Madison is the capital of the U.S. state of Wisconsin and the county seat of Dane County. It is also home to the University of Wisconsin–Madison....
  
  , Chazen Museum of Art
  Chazen Museum of Art
  The Chazen Museum of Art is an art museum accredited by the American Association of Museums located at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in Madison, Wisconsin. It was known as the Elvehjem Museum of Art until 2005...
  
  

Kylix 1976.31

• Munich
  Munich
  Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
  
  , Glyptothek and Antikensammlung
  Staatliche Antikensammlungen
  The Staatliche Antikensammlungen in the Kunstareal of Munich is a museum for the Bavarian state's antique collections for Greek, Etruscan and Roman art. The Bavarian state collection of Ancient Egyptian art is traditionally placed in its own museum...
  
  

kantharos 2565 • bowl 2688 • bowl 2689

• New York
  New York
  New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
  
  , Metropolitan Museum of Art
  Metropolitan Museum of Art
  The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...
  
  

skyphos 06.1079 • pyxis 07.286.36 • bobin 29.167 • bowl 41.162.9

• Oxford
  Oxford
  The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...
  
  , Ashmolean Museum
  Ashmolean Museum
  The Ashmolean Museum on Beaumont Street, Oxford, England, is the world's first university museum...
  
  

bowl 1931.12

• Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale (Cabinet des Médailles)

bowl 814

• Paris, Musée National du Louvre
  Louvre
  The Musée du Louvre – in English, the Louvre Museum or simply the Louvre – is one of the world's largest museums, the most visited art museum in the world and a historic monument. A central landmark of Paris, it is located on the Right Bank of the Seine in the 1st arrondissement...
  
  

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
  Vienna
  Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
  
  , Kunsthistorisches Museum
  Kunsthistorisches Museum
  The Kunsthistorisches Museum is an art museum in Vienna, Austria. Housed in its festive palatial building on Ringstraße, it is crowned with an octagonal dome...
  
  

bowl 3700

External links

• The Perseus Project - Vases by the Penthesilea Painter

Source of translation