Cage Painter
Ancient Greece · Archaic Greek art
The story
A boy holding a bird cage gave this painter his name. The picture is on a drinking cup found at Orvieto in central Italy and now in the British Museum, and when the Oxford scholar John Beazley grouped the cups he thought were by the same hand, he named their unknown painter after it.
The Cage Painter worked in Athens around 490 to 480 BC, in red-figure, the technique in which figures are left in the colour of the clay and the background is painted black. He decorated mainly drinking cups, with athletes, young men and the drinking parties at which such cups were used. Like many Athenian cups of the time, his were shipped west, and they have been found in Etruscan towns in Italy, at Orvieto, Tarquinia and Chiusi.
