Niobid Painter

In Athens in the 460s and 450s BC, one pottery workshop specialised in very large vases, wine-mixing bowls and tall jars, and its leading painter never signed his work. Modern scholars call him the Niobid Painter, after a krater in the Louvre on which Apollo and Artemis shoot down the children of Niobe, a mother who had boasted that she had more children than theirs. He worked beside an older colleague now known as the Altamura Painter.

He liked crowded heroic subjects, battles between Greeks and Amazons above all, and he often turned a face to three-quarter view instead of the old strict profile. A krater in the British Museum shows a quieter side of him, the gods gathered around Pandora, the first woman, as Aphrodite crowns her. His manner carried on in the same workshop. One of the painters who followed him signed his vases Polygnotos, the name of the most famous wall painter of the day, though the two were different men.