18 Facts About Amasis Painter

The Amasis Painter was an ancient Greek vase painter who worked in the black-figure technique.

Amasis Painter owes his name to the signature of the potter Amasis, who signed twelve works painted by the same hand.

The Amasis Painter borrows scenes from the Heidelberg Painter, such as a warrior dressing himself in greaves with multiple bystanders; however, the Amasis Painter adds his own touch in the treatment of his figures, imparting a greater sense of detail, and often adding a signature double-band border and palmette-lotus festoon to the ornamental decoration.

The career of the Amasis Painter was long, spanning nearly 50 years from around 560 to 515 BC, and encompassed the transition from the early to mature phases in Attic black-figure vase painting.

The Amasis Painter was singular in his reaction to the rapid changes happening around him.

However, the Amasis Painter rejected certain trends and managed to maintain a consistency that can be traced throughout, making it difficult to date works within his lifetime.

Whether the painter was indeed the potter or not, the Amasis Painter decorated a wide variety of shapes, including panel and neck amphorae, used for wine or oil storage; oinochoai, wine pouring jugs; lethythoi, oil jars; alabastra and aryballoi, for oils or perfumes; and a variety of drinking cups, including mastoids, skyphoi, and kylikes.

The Amasis Painter tackled nearly every subject available to the sixth-century vase painter; of 165 scenes, 20 are narrative mythological subjects.

The Amasis Painter is credited as the first to show non-specific scenes of interactions between gods, especially Dionysus and his merry revelers whom he painted more than 20 times, compared to Exekias' one.

Amasis Painter extends these representations of gods to include mortals; as Stewart argues, such scenes speak to the painter's ability to evoke a contemporary cultural awareness of the ever-present gods in Greek daily life.

The Amasis Painter was a pioneer in his depiction of genre scenes of everyday life, such as the transport by cart of a newly married couple to the house of the groom, or the working of wool by a group of women.

The Amasis Painter is recognizable by his preference for symmetry, precision and clarity, and expressiveness through mastery of his medium and composition.

Finally, the Amasis Painter is most recognizable in his use of floral ornamental bands, which Beazley characterizes as lively and vivid.

Amasis Painter used both of these motifs throughout his career, and, especially in later works, they are notable for their excellent symmetry and balance of color.

Importantly, JD Beazley's connoisseurship accounts for the oeuvre of the Amasis Painter, and allows modern viewers and scholars to consider his work in this way.

Exekias and the Amasis Painter were equally talented, each in his own way, and instrumental to the development of black-figure vase painting in Athens.

The Amasis Painter and His World was a critical step in acknowledging the individual body of work of this painter and his contributions to the black-figure repertoire, while highlighting the limitations of over- or under-estimating the influence of a single artist working in any age.

The Amasis Painter's oeuvre provides a fascinating glimpse into one part of this puzzle, which, when pieced together by scholars, reveals much about the arts and crafts of Archaic Greece.