Red-figure pottery first achieved prominence in the modern world through antiquarianism and the collection of souvenirs on the Grand Tour. This fundamentally shaped the scholarship of this class of pottery. Vases were valued for their completeness, their iconography—scenes depicting Greek myth and literature being particularly prized—and their aesthetic qualities. Famous private collections were formed, many of which subsequently entered the world's great museums. Less value was placed upon the vessels as archaeological objects. The contexts in which they were found, their associations with other objects and their roles in ancient society were given little consideration. The pursuit of intact vases led to a focus on cemeteries, and many discoveries were, and indeed continue to be, the result of looting. Thus, most museum collections are dominated by vessels without proper provenance. Moreover, collections are skewed towards funerary and, to a lesser extent, sanctuary evidence, and away from material used in domestic contexts. The importance of iconography and aesthetics means that museums tend to display the most varied and beautiful vessels, ignoring much of the output of ancient workshops.
There is one further factor that shaped modern tastes and, indirectly, scholarship: the recognition that many of the vases discovered in the cemeteries of ancient Italy, and Etruria in particular, were of Athenian origin. Athens dominates our knowledge of Classical Greece because so many of the surviving literary and historical sources were written in Athens or for an Athenian readership. Consequently, Athenian vases, by virtue of their association with the city-state came to be valued higher than those produced elsewhere. The technical quality of Athenian vases cannot be denied and, together with the power of Athens in the fifth century BC, this goes a long way towards explaining the popularity of these wares in antiquity. Athenian clays, when properly fired, produce an intense orange-red, which could be enhanced by a coat of miltos (red ochre), and a deep, shiny black that adheres well to the vessel body. The contrast between the red and the black, which gives red-figure pottery its potency, is often best realised in Athenian work. The prioritising of Athenian vessels over the output of other workshops has meant that the latter have been less studied than the former. Moreover, as Enlightenment tastes came to favour the restraint of the fifth-century Classical style over what might be termed the baroque exuberance of the fourth century, so many regional productions, which only reached their heyday in the fourth century, came to be seen as artistically debased, if not vulgar.
The Scheirup and Sebatai volume deals with some of the regional productions in Greece, Magna Graecia and Central Italy. The Greek productions—from Boeotia, Corinth, Euboea, Laconia, Ambracia and Macedon—which are addressed in nine papers, are all comparatively understudied and share other similarities. They are relatively small productions made for consumption in communities close to where the vases were produced. Many are quite short-lived. The range of vase shapes produced is similarly restricted. Often they would appear to have been produced at centres making other kinds of pottery and ceramics. For example, in Boeotia, black-figure pottery persisted long after it had been superseded elsewhere; the rare production of bilingual vases in the black- and red-figure techniques demonstrates that red-figure vessels were produced in the same workshops that continued to make local black-figure wares. In many places, these red-figure productions seem to emerge either to replace Athenian imports that were becoming harder to obtain or to offer a locally produced substitute for Athenian wares for those who might not have been able to afford the real thing. These economic concerns cast light upon local communities and their connectedness to each other and to Athens. The iconography tells us about local customs and preferences, thereby helping to create a more nuanced picture of Greece in the Classical period.
The work of Sir John Beazley is still fundamental to the study of Athenian and other Greek productions. Similarly, his work on Etruscan vase-painting remains seminal. Etruscan red-figure is, in numerous ways, similar to the output of the Greek regional workshops. It is a comparatively limited production and takes themes from Athens and adapts them, often radically, for the local market. Athens, however, was not the only influence on Etruscan red-figure, as it was also indebted to the Apulian style from south-east Italy. Two papers address Etruscan products. That by Harari can be singled out, as it takes a traditional scholarly concern, the interpretation of iconography, and provides a fresh interpretive angle. By examining the generic figures on the exterior of cups (kylikes) of the Tondo Class, he posits a fuller interpretation of this group as a whole and of Etruscan attitudes towards wine, erotic themes and funerary ritual.
The South Italian and Sicilian industries are quite different. These productions are more comprehensive, in terms of the range of vases produced, and more enduring, in some cases surviving into the period after the Athenian industry had ceased production. Six papers in the Scheirup and Sebatai volume address this material. The need for a thorough re-appraisal of Sicilian red-figure pottery has long been recognised. Although this work is far from complete, the three papers here make significant strides. They demonstrate: the diversity of the early phases of Sicilian production, a diversity that did not endure in subsequent phases; the probable impact of military and political history on production; the relationship to Athenian and other South Italian styles; and the dating of the cessation of the local industry. Elia's paper deals with the red-figure pottery from Locri Epizephyrii in Calabria, a production inspired by one of the early Sicilian variants that did not endure on the island. Production of red-figure pottery in Italy seems to have begun in Metapontum, perhaps in the work of the Amykos Painter. Schierup begins to unravel the intricacies of the early industry, in terms of production, use, morphology and iconography. Robinson's paper, dealing with Apulian material, inevitably overlaps with the second volume under review.
What Beazley was to Athenian figure-pottery so Dale Trendall was to the red-figure productions of Magna Graecia and Sicily. He devoted his career to identifying painters and workshops, extrapolating relationships between them. His fascination with attribution was far greater than his interest in archaeological context so, at times, provenances were not recorded in his extensive corpora, even when they were known. This demonstrates how far scholarship on red-figure pottery had become distanced from standard archaeological research.
Apulian production was a major industry. Almost 14 000 vases were catalogued in the volumes by Trendall and Cambitoglou (Reference Trendall and Cambitoglou1978, Reference Trendall and Cambitoglou1982, Reference Trendall and Cambitoglou1983, Reference Trendall and Cambitoglou1992). Robinson (in Scheirup and Sebatai, p. 219, footnote 1) estimates that the surviving output could be almost double that figure, as numerous vases have come to light since Trendall's death.
Apulian red-figure pottery, which is the subject of the volume edited by Carpenter, Lynch and Robinson, has a number of distinguishing features. Some of the large vases show a stunning level of potting expertise. Unfortunately, the scale of the vessels, their iconography and the extensive use of plastic additions are all somewhat anathema to modern tastes, leaving their technical prowess underappreciated. Thus, aside from attribution, the study of Apulian red-figure pottery has tended to focus on shapes derived from indigenous South Italian pottery, the portrayal of indigenous people (mostly men) and the depiction of rare myths and scenes from, or influenced by, ancient Greek drama. All of these are interesting topics but they address only a minority of vessels. For example, those showing native men account for less than two per cent of the total published in the main corpora. A vast amount of Apulian red-figure pottery, especially that produced after c. 340 BC, consists of serial productions, mostly smaller vases often depicting female figures, Eros figures, female heads and the like. We see similar phenomena in other contemporary red-figure industries, not just South Italy. Such material does not excite the connoisseur and seldom looms large in museums displays. Nevertheless, such vases talk of a changing society and of a ceramic industry responsive to that change. Among other topics that are now becoming the focus of productive research, explored in the 13 chapters of this book, are: the relationship with Early Lucanian pottery and the beginnings of the Apulian industry; identification of production centres and Tarentum's status within the industry; the possibilities and limitations of archaeometric approaches; chronology, the re-attribution of vases and the re-definition of relationships between painters and workshops in the light of finds from reliable excavations; the differing roles that Apulian red-figure pottery played in Greek and indigenous contexts; customer selection in matters of morphology and iconography; and the histories of collecting and scholarship.
The study of vase-painting has been severely hampered by the history of collecting and the resultant fuelling of the antiquities market by illegal excavations. New excavations and fresh approaches to old evidence have transformed the field in recent years. The sheer number of surviving vessels offers opportunities for statistical analyses that can contextualise even unprovenanced vases within the wider output of an industry. The age of attribution studies has passed. Instead, this work has become foundational to a new generation of scholars asking fresh questions of these datasets. The papers in the two volumes reviewed here give a sense of how lively this scholarship has become and the potential it has to unlock new knowledge about ancient producers, traders and consumers of figure pottery.
