Master of Attic Red-Figure Painting

Red-figure vase painting is today considered one of the most important art forms of the classical world. Developing in Athens around 520 BC, it had supplanted within a few decades the previously hegemonic black-figure painting which preceded it. The artists who took up red-figure painting were now able to represent the human form in poses and actions - whether religious, erotic or mythic - of a new and subtle complexity. In this authoritative follow-up to E A Moignard's companion volume on Exekias, Amy Smith discusses arguably the greatest of all the red-figure painters: the Pan Painter, so-called after the krater vase, now in Boston, attributed to his hand which shows the god Pan in aroused pursuit of a goatherd. The author reveals her subject as a genius who combined an artist's flair and technical brilliance with an acute and irreverent sense of the human predicament. Focusing in each chapter on a single major artwork, Smith discusses the great variety of themes depicted there: including war and redemption, pursuit and capture, music and mayhem and the daily rituals of work and religion.