South Italian Vase-painting:

The only visual humour that most classicists are usually aware of are the so-called phlyax scenespainted on South Italian vases and possibly inspired from Old Comedy. I will therefore rapidlydiscuss visual humour within South Italian vase-painting before focusing on the satyr and hiscentral role in Greek visual humour. Most aspects of these South Italian phlyax scenes have beentreated systematically by Trendall and more recently by Taplin (2007). What was the purpose ofrepresenting actors on stage? Was it an ‘interesting’ subject, which painters knewwould delight their buyers because it reminded them of a funny play they may have seen? Were theyintended to be funny not just by their reference to stage comedy but through their visualrepresentation?

This section is a very brief incursion into South Italian (Apulian, Paestan, and Lucanian)humorous iconography rather than a survey. It is beyond the scope of the present work to probe SouthItalian iconography beyond this admittedly cursory examination. During the early day of the RomanRepublic, there seemed to have been a local genre of tragic parody known as hilarotragodia or phlyaxplays. The word meant ‘gossip’ plays (in the plural phlyakes). A number of vases fromvarious regions in Southern Italy depict mock-heroic scenes. Although the debate has centred on alocal versus Old Greek Comedy (Aristophanic) origin for the inspiration of these vases, somescholars, such as Green and Handley (1995: 53), have suggested the possibility of a Greek‘classic revival’ in Southern Italy, and Taplin also proposed that a number of thesephlyax vases were actually visual parodies of ‘serious’ Italian imagery.