A new phenomenon in the international art world is the propensity for exhibitions or ganized around a single artist from Greek an tiquity. This innovative development bears little relationship to biographical curiosity, as next to nothing is really known about these ancient craftsmen. The traveling exhibition of vases and fragments of vases by the Attic red-figured vase painter Euphronios (fl. c. 520-470 B.C.), which recently closed at the Louvre, was an internationally cooperative venture encouraged by the connoisseurship that has greatly expanded the number of at tributions to this artist, revealing a wider prospectus of his career.[1]

Scores of anonymous Greek vase painters are affectionately given names that describe a stylistic eccentricity or conspicuous subject so that scholars can group vases by individual hands: “The Affecter,” “Elbows Out,” “The Pan Painter,” “The Painter of the Woolly Sat yrs,” etc. We know Euphronios’s real name because he signed vases as their painter with the signature Euphronios egrapsen(Eu phronios painted [me]) and, later in his life, as their potter or maker, Euphronios epoiesen (Euphronios made [me]). Presumably as he matured in his profession Euphronios as sumed the more remunerative and socially significant position of potter and—since he was prosperous enough to make an expen sive dedication on the Acropolis at some point in his life—probably master of the workshop. This elevation of status reminds us that, after all, the production of the pot preceded its painting. There are many more signatures of pot makers than of painters in