Dinos of the Gorgon Painter
Gorgon Painter (active c. 600-570 BC) · c. 580 BC
A great wine-mixing bowl sits on its tall stand, the two together almost a metre high, every surface covered with painted friezes. On the top band of the bowl the story of Perseus unfolds: the hero runs away to the right with the head of Medusa in his bag, while her two gorgon sisters, winged and wearing short tunics and boots, chase him in the kneeling run that Greek painters used for speed. Athena and Hermes stand by, and Medusa's headless body collapses. On the other side chariots and armed warriors clash. Below run rows of lions, panthers, boars and rams.
The vase was painted in Athens around 580 BC by an artist scholars call the Gorgon Painter, after this very piece, and it is one of the earliest Athenian vases to show a mythological narrative on a large scale. The animal friezes are inherited from Corinthian pottery, which Athens was then beginning to surpass; the figures are painted in black silhouette with incised details and touches of red. It was found in an Etruscan tomb at Cerveteri, north of Rome, and entered the Louvre with the Campana collection in 1861.
Did You Know? The anonymous artist who painted this vase is known to scholars only by the name given to him from it: the Gorgon Painter.
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