Athana Painter
Ancient Greece · Archaic Greek art
The story
Athana is how the people of Corinth wrote the name of the goddess Athena, in the Doric Greek they spoke, and it is the name modern scholars gave to one of the city's vase painters. He signed nothing. Like most of his colleagues he exists only as a recognisable hand, a way of drawing that specialists can follow from one pot to the next. The name is listed in the great catalogue of Corinthian vase painting published in 1988 by the American scholar Darrell Amyx.
He worked between about 600 and 575 BC, when Corinthian black-figure pottery still led the Greek export trade, before Athenian workshops overtook it around the middle of the century. One of the vases given to him is a wine-mixing bowl in the Louvre with a banquet on one side and four horsemen on the other. It was found at Cerveteri, an Etruscan city north of Rome.
