Makron

Makron signed his name only once. It appears on a deep drinking cup now in Boston, painted around 490 to 480 BC, where Paris leads Helen away from Sparta on one side and, on the other, her husband Menelaos finds her again as Troy falls. Next to it stands a second name, Hieron, the potter who made the cup.

That pairing was the pattern of his whole career. The German archaeologist Adolf Furtwängler was the first to link the two men, and the Oxford scholar John Beazley went on to show that Makron painted nearly every vase that carries Hieron's signature. Athenian painters often moved from one workshop to another. Makron, as far as we can tell, stayed with one.

He was also extremely productive. Beazley gave him about 350 vases, nearly all of them cups, and later counts run higher still. He painted the life of Athenian men at leisure, drinking parties and revellers, athletes and young men courting, along with gods and the stories of Troy. What specialists single out is his drapery, thin garments that fall in many fine folds and swing with the movement of the body beneath.

Many of his cups travelled west to the Etruscans. A libation scene of his, now in the Louvre, was found at Vulci.