Euphronios

Around 510 BC the Athenian painter Euthymides added a boast to one of his own vases, an amphora now in Munich. Beside his figures he wrote "as never Euphronios", usually read as a claim that his rival could never have done as well. Painters rarely named one another, and the man he chose to measure himself against shows who set the standard in the potters' quarter of Athens at that moment.

Euphronios belonged to the painters now called the Pioneer Group, who in the last decades of the 6th century BC explored what the new red-figure technique could do. He liked large figures and powerful bodies, and he drew their muscles with fine raised lines and thinned glaze that fired to shades between pale yellow and brown. He signed his vases as their painter, and later in life he gave up painting for potting and signed as the maker instead.

His best-known work is a great wine-mixing bowl on which Sleep and Death lift the body of Sarpedon, a son of Zeus killed at Troy, while Hermes, the messenger god, looks on. It was dug up illegally near Cerveteri, north of Rome, in 1971, bought the next year by the Metropolitan Museum in New York and handed back to Italy in 2008. Today it is on show in the archaeological museum at Cerveteri, close to where it was found.

On another bowl, now in the Louvre, he painted Herakles wrestling the giant Antaios, the hero with neatly curled hair and beard, the giant with a wild, unkempt mane.