Sophilos

Sophilos ( ancient Greek Σώφιλος ) was an Athenian potters and vase painter of the black-figure style, who worked around 590-570 BC.

Sophilos is the oldest name currently known Attic vase painter. From him two signed fragments of wine boilers ( Dinoi ) are preserved in Athens, showing that he has painted them and made ​​the vessels themselves. A total of 37 vases, mainly amphorae, Dinoi and craters and three Pinakes are attributed to them today. Besides his work for the domestic market, he was one of the masters who were instrumental in the Attic vases in Etruscan and Italic and Greek unteritalisch - room, the most important export destination Greek vases, the Corinthian vase painting repressed. His work has been exported even to the Black Sea region, Syria and Egypt ( Naucratis ).

He was one of the first painters who used their works paint in great style and so considerably enlarged the visual and artistic distance of the black-figure vase painting for Corinthian vase painting. While Sophilos still holding in his ornaments and animal representations of old traditions, he trod with the interposition of a mostly mythological scenes completely new ways. He broke through the standardized scenarios, let figures in some cases operate individually and told what is happening in a funny, totally unconventional way new. With increasing maturity of his own style, he urged the ornamental design for the benefit of figural who took more and more space back. Stylistically, his works are close to the late Gorgon Painter He further developed, thereby paving the way for Klitias, which then culminates in the Françoisvase.

Despite its progressive image composition and talent to create new scenes again and again, his line was usually not very carefully, but the overall impression of his works hardly hurts.

Works (selection)

• Athens, National Museum

• Formerly Berlin Collection of Classical Antiquities

• Boston, Museum of Fine Arts

• Jena, Friedrich -Schiller- University

• London, British Museum