Classical Antiquity
The Andokides Painter (540 BCE–510 BCE)
Greek Attic Black-Figure potter.
The Andokides Painter is the conventional name for the Athenian vase-painter who, working with the potter Andokides around 530–510 BCE, produced the first bilingual amphorae — pots with one side in the old black-figure technique and the other in the new red-figure. His own name is lost; Beazley grouped the hand and named it after the potter's signatures. The dates here are a floruit, not a recorded life.
Bilingual amphorae are the invention that matters. On one side figures are black silhouettes with incised interiors; on the other they are reserved in clay against black glaze, drawn with a brush. The same myth — Herakles reclining with Athena, Herakles and Cerberus — can be tried in both languages on a single pot, a workshop experiment that announced red-figure as a rival to the older craft.
Beazley's Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters and Boardman's archaic handbook treat him as the inventor, or among the inventors, of the red-figure technique. The vases left Athens as exports; several of the finest were found in Etruria.
The words the record keeps using: experimental, clear, heroic, transitional, bold, workshop.
At a glance
- Lived 540 BCE–510 BCE
- Origin Greek (Athenian)
- Worked in Athens
- Era Classical Antiquity
- Movements Attic Black-Figure, Attic Red-Figure
- Mediums Ceramic with slip decoration
- Techniques Black-figure incision, Red-figure brush line
Works in the archive
- Herakles and Cerberus, 530 BCE (Musée du Louvre, Paris (F 204))
The red-figure side of a bilingual amphora: Herakles leads Cerberus, the three-headed hound of Hades, in the last of the labors. The other side of the same pot treats related heroic matter in black-figure — the… - Herakles and Apollo Struggle for the Tripod, 525 BCE (Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (F 2159; ARV 3, 1); from Vulci)
Athena, Herakles, Apollo, and Artemis lock around the Delphic tripod — the hero's theft of the oracular seat restated as a four-figure contest. The reverse shows wrestlers in the palaestra, so myth and the gymnasium… - Herakles Reclining with Athena (bilingual amphora), 520 BCE (Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich (inv. 2301; ARV 4, 9); from Vulci)
On this famous bilingual amphora Herakles reclines on a kline with a kantharos while Athena stands by — a symposium of the hero and his goddess. The other side restates the scene in the opposite technique, the…
What was said
Beazley listed the Andokides Painter at the head of Attic red-figure and treated the bilingual amphorae associated with the potter Andokides as the starting-point of the new technique — a named workshop personality reconstructed from the pots.
Boardman's archaic red-figure handbook presents the Andokides Painter as the inventor, or a principal inventor, of red-figure, using bilingual amphorae to set the new drawing against the old black-figure on a single pot.
Herakles is the workshop's preferred test subject — reclining with Athena, leading Cerberus, seizing Apollo's tripod — so the technical experiment is carried by the most familiar heroic body in the Athenian repertory.
Lineage
Passed on to The Berlin Painter
What would The Andokides Painter make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after The Andokides Painter", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with The Andokides Painter · Keep a life moment the way The Andokides Painter would · Pictures made after The Andokides Painter