Both in sculpture and in vase-painting, the identity and personality of individual craftsmen still exert a strong attraction. The cult of the creative artist is too deeply ingrained in our own thinking to be jettisoned totally in favour of other, more impersonal considerations, and so there is much scholarship still carried out from the point of view of the individual. The name of the artist may be known to us through the historical tradition as preserved in the literary sources or through the random discovery of names in inscriptions. The absence of a name says nothing about the quality of a work, its presence may tell us much about the posthumous standing of the artist. It is good to be reminded that working with the names of artists that we know, is a very restricting method of proceeding, it is as if we possessed a complete list of sculptors actually at work and had only to pick a name from the list. Connoisseurship has shown that the name may be an unnecessary addition, the very workmanship declares the hand, and with aesthetic sensitivity and stylistic analysis scholars can create lost personalities. Some studies widen the point of view and consider the stylistic elements that go to make up a region, others prefer to think in terms of works, not artists and to consider sculpture as a manifesto that needs to be set against its historical background.

The erection of a building - be it temple, treasury, colonnade, or theatre - argues commitment, means, and purpose, and the architectural sculpture that adorned the religious buildings is likely to have had programmatic intent, whether religious or political. The very complexity of the undertaking, and the limitation of the shapes decorated, have been seen as generating forces behind the development of advances in archaic sculpture. This is Anthony Snodgrass’s antithesis to the position he maintains about the production of kouroi and korai (see p. 10 above): ‘It is the pedimental figures which should be held up as examples of the attainment of Archaic sculptors . . . their adventurousness in pose and subject was the biggest contribution of the age to later sculpture.’

In the summer of 1985 the centenary of the birth of Sir John Beazley was celebrated in London and Oxford. His influence on the study of Greek painted pottery, particularly Attic (Colour Plate 4A, etc.), has been second to none this century, and his death in 1970 left a gap that has been impossible to fill. Since his death, titles of lectures and conferences such as ‘Beazley and After’, ‘Vasenforschung nach Beazley’ and ‘In the Wake of Beazley’ show what a pivotal figure he was, and the 70s and 80s have proved interesting times for re-adjusting sights. As Martin Robertson remarked, we are living in ‘an age of uncertainty.

Admiration for the quality and appearance of Greek pottery, and interest in the subject matter of the figured scenes, have until recently tended to draw attention away from other aspects of the study. In reaction to what is seen as an overemphasis on attribution, both of painters and of potters, one approach which has been adopted is to consider the organization of the shops which produced the pottery, to see the pottery in its sociological context. Talk of ‘pupils’, ‘masters’, ‘influence’ etc. presupposes that we know the arrangements under which the potters and painters worked, but hard facts are few.

There is evidence from excavated kilns, but the workshops which lay nearby and their spatial organization are less well known. The Potters’ Quarter at Corinth gives a better idea than other sites of this aspect, but there are no kilns there, and we do not know how typical the Potters’ Quarter was - there were other areas of production at Corinth.

Greek pottery provides us with a fascinating, if bewildering, variety of painted scenes. It is therefore no cause for astonishment that study of imagery, iconography, narrative method, mythical and contemporary subject matter, etc. should be of major scholarly concern. Scholars work with the evidence they possess but have to keep in mind what is missing - both from literature and from art. The more closely investigated such matters are, the more obvious it becomes that we must be careful to make distinctions between the imagery of different centres of vase production, and also between the imagery in vase-painting and that in other media, especially sculpture. It is inevitable that Athens has been the area most intensively probed, and that myth has been the most attractive magnet.