Brygos Painter
Ancient Greece · Archaic Greek art
The story
On a cup now in Würzburg in Germany, painted in Athens around 480 BC, a young man bends over after a drinking party and is sick, while a girl holds his head. The painter of that cup paid attention to what people do with their mouths and throats. His drinkers sing, whistle and blow the pipes, and it is details like these that make him one of the most closely watched painters of his generation.
His real name is lost. He is called the Brygos Painter after the potter Brygos, whose signature, "Brygos made it", appears on more than a dozen vases, several of them decorated by this hand. He worked from about 490 to 470 BC, and more than 200 vases are attributed to him, most of them drinking cups.
His range ran from the party to the Trojan War. A cup in the Louvre shows the night Troy fell, with the old king Priam killed at an altar. On a tall vase in Munich he painted two poets from the island of Lesbos, Alcaeus and Sappho, who had lived more than a century before him, and wrote their names beside them.
