Paestan Pottery

Most of the previous scholarship on Paestan red-figure pottery has focused on the cataloguing of collections, the attribution of vases to painters and workshops, iconographic and stylistic matters, and individual vessels and vase forms. This partly reflects the history of vase-painting scholarship, which grew out of antiquarian collecting during 18th and 19th centuries, and partly the fact that a full archaeological provenance is not preserved for the majority of vessels. This book uses a database containing in excess of 1,800 vessels and fragments to identify patterns in the production and decoration of Paestan vases that cast light on the choices made by vase-producers and the preferences of their customers. It considers the popularity of different vessel shapes over time, the use of highly generic decorative scenes, which are characteristic of Paestan red-figure, as well as the popularity of scenes of myth, images of the gods, and scenes of nude and half-draped women. Paestan red-figure is compared with the vessels decorated in Applied Red produced at the same site. A comparison is also made between the output of the Paestan red-figure industry and that of Apulia. As the majority of the vases in the sample derive from tombs, the patterns identified provide insights into the ways in which the ancient populations of Paestum and South-West Italy commemorated the dead.

This volume, which represents the Proceedings of an international conference sponsered by the Center for the Ancient Mediterranean at Columbia University, deals with Greek painted vases, and explores them from various methodological points of view.

This work deals with classical Greek pottery from a number of points of view - technique, period, place of production, function, shape, decoration and distribution. The book places an emphasis on the every-day uses of Greek pottery - as containers for water, wine, fish, honey and olives, for example - and does not treat it as art. The author explains the importance of clay as a fundamental natural resource in the lives of the ancient Greeks, stressing its versatility as a container in varying conditions of heat and cold. The book aims to offer a broad picture of Greek pottery that gives an idea of its variety and importance without dwelling too heavily upon the high-quality figured vases.

Most of the previous scholarship on Apulian red-figure pottery has focused on the cataloguing of collections, the attribution of vases to painters and workshops, iconographic and stylistic matters, and individual vessels and vase forms. This partly reflects the history of vase-painting scholarship, which grew out of antiquarian collecting during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the fact that a full archaeological provenance is not preserved for the overwhelming majority of vessels. This book takes a different approach by using a database containing in excess of 13,500 vessels and fragments to identify patterns in the production and decoration of Apulian vases that cast light on the choices made by vase-producers and the preferences of their customers. Individual chapters consider the popularity of different vessel shapes over time, the use of highly generic decorative scenes, which are characteristic of Apulian red-figure, as well as the popularity of scenes of myth, images of the gods, scenes of the life of the non-Greek population of ancient Puglia, and those showing funerary monuments. As virtually all of the vases in the sample derive from tombs, the patterns identified provide insights into the ways in which the ancient populations of South-East Italy, both Greek and indigenous, honoured their dead.

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