Heidelberg University Publishing

Abstract In this chapter on ancient Greek vase-painting, I undertake a comparative study of the place of the artist in two different spaces: his posi­tion in Greek society and the Greek cultural imagi­nation, and ‘his’ (or rather his signature’s) position on the material object of his craft, namely the vase. While the social standing of the potter-painters of Classical Athens seems to have been rather low, some elements help us to carve out a more com­plex picture. The evidence for wealthy potters, the high esteem given to the products of highly so­phisticated, ‘artistic’ craft, and the very many sig­natures found on vases from early on all compel us to rethink simplistic ideas about the low esteem of the baunausos working with one’s own hands. Most puzzling are self-representations of artisans that show off – rather than conceal – the conde­scending view of the artisan’s bodily ugliness. Turn­ing to the signatures’ place on the painted vases, I first discuss signatures in the context of other types of inscriptions that we know from Attic vases, namely the frequent name-tags and kalos-inscrip­tions, and the rare cases of inscribed direct speech. Although the overall aesthetics of signatures does not differ dramatically from that of other types of inscriptions, so as to be recognizable as such only upon reading, we may still detect a special affinity of signatures to those parts of a drinking-vessel that define the object’s functionality, and that may be concretely touched by the drinker/viewer/reader: the handles and the foot of a vase. The ‘embodied terminology’ for naming the parts of a Greek vase, which is used in scholarly literature and which is borrowed from ancient Greek texts themselves, re­veals the degree to which the body-analogy of the crafted vase was taken seriously. Signatures of the type ‘so-and-so made me’ therefore define, meta­phorically speaking, the vase as the (beautiful and esteemed!) body of the artist, who transfers his own beauty to the product of his craft.

Keywords Greek Vase-Painting; Signatures; Material Writing; Image and Text; Embodiment