Kraipale Painter
Ancient Greece · Classical Greek art
The story
This painter is named after a hangover. On a wine jug in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, a woman sits with a drinking cup, leaning on the ivy-topped staff of Dionysus, and the letters beside her spell Kraipale, the Greek word for the aching head that follows a night of drinking. Beside her stand a satyr labelled Sikinnos and a second woman, Thymedia, holding an incense burner. When the Oxford scholar John Beazley grouped the vases he believed were by one anonymous hand, he named their painter after this jug.
The Kraipale Painter worked in Athens around 430 BC, in red-figure, the technique in which the figures keep the colour of the clay and the background is painted black. The works given to him include small, round-bellied wine jugs of the kind Athenians called choes. The Boston jug itself was found at Vulci, an Etruscan city north of Rome, whose tombs have yielded Athenian painted pottery in great quantity.
