Maker/Artist
Berlin Painter
Attic vase painter, active ca. 500-ca. 460 BCE
Considered to be one of the best red-figure vase painters, the Berlin Painter worked in Athens from about 500 to the 460s BCE. He was a technically masterful and prolific artist with about three hundred of his vases surviving. Almost all his work was in the red-figure technique, but he did try white-ground and black-figure. Although he did not invent the scheme of an isolated figure on each side of the vase surrounded by black glaze, the Berlin Painter popularized and perfected its use. He was not innovative in his subject matter, but he gave his figures a new air of elegance, aloofness, and grandeur. Since the shapes of his vases so precisely fit the proportions of his spotlighted figures, some scholars speculate that he may also have been the potter. As with most ancient artists, the real name of the Berlin Painter is unknown, and he is identified only by the stylistic traits of his work. Scholars named him after one of his amphorae in the Antikensammlung in Berlin.
