Gardners Art through the Ages A Global History

wife. The red scarf, mirror, and jug hanging on the wall behind the

woman indicate that the setting is the interior of their home. The

motif of the seated woman is strikingly similar to that of Hegeso on

her grave stele (FIG. 5-57), but here the woman is the survivor. It is

her husband, preparing to go to war with helmet, shield, and spear,

who will depart, never to return. On his shield is a large painted eye,

roughly life-size. Greek shields often were decorated with devices

such as the horrific face of snake-haired Medusa, intended to ward

off evil spirits and frighten the enemy. This eye undoubtedly was

meant to recall this tradition, but it was little more than an excuse

for the Achilles Painter to display superior drawing skills. Since the

late sixth centuryBCE, Greek painters had abandoned the Archaic

habit of placing frontal eyes on profile faces and attempted to render

the eyes in profile. The Achilles Painter’s mastery of this difficult

problem in foreshortening is on exhibit here.

POLYGNOTOS The leading painter of the first half of the fifth

centuryBCEwas Polygnotos of Thasos, whose works adorned impor-

tant buildings both in Athens and Delphi. One of these was the

pinakotheke of Mnesikles’ Propylaia, but the most famous was a

portico in the Athenian marketplace that came to be called the Stoa

Poikile (Painted Stoa). Descriptions of Polygnotos’s paintings make

clear that he introduced a revolutionary compositional style. Before

Polygnotos, figures stood on a common ground line at the bottom of

the picture plane, whether they appeared in horizontal bands or

single panels. Polygnotos placed his figures on different levels, stag-

gered in tiers in the manner of Ashurbanipal’s lion-hunt relief (FIG.

2-23) of two centuries before. He also incorporated landscape ele-

ments into his paintings, making his pictures true “windows onto

the world” and not simply surface designs peopled with foreshort-

ened figures. Polygnotos’s abandonment of a single ground line was

as momentous a break from the past as Early Classical Greek sculp-

tors’ rejection of frontality in statuary.

NIOBID PAINTERPolygnotos’s influence is evident on a red-

figure krater (FIG. 5-59) painted around the middle of the fifth cen-

turyBCEby the Niobid Painter—so named because one side of the

krater depicts the massacre of the Niobids, the children of Niobe.

Niobe, who had at least a dozen children, had boasted that she was

superior to the goddess Leto, who had only two offspring, Apollo

Early and High Classical Periods 135

5-58Achilles Painter,Warrior taking leave of his wife (Athenian

white-ground lekythos), from Eretria, Greece, ca. 440 bce. 1  5 high.

National Archaeological Museum, Athens.

White-ground painters applied the colors after firing because most

colored glazes could not withstand the kiln’s heat. The Achilles Painter

here displayed his mastery at drawing an eye in profile.

5-59Niobid Painter,Artemis and Apollo slaying the children

of Niobe (Athenian red-figure calyx krater), from Orvieto, Italy,

ca. 450 bce. 1  9 high. Louvre, Paris.

The placement of figures on different levels in a landscape on this

red-figure krater depicting the massacre of Niobe’s children reflects

the compositions of the lost panel paintings of Polygnotos of Thasos.

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