Lecture: Who is the Berlin Painter?

This lecture was delivered by J. Michael Padgett, curator of Ancient Art at the Princeton University Art Museum, in conjunction with the opening of the exhibition The Berlin Painter and His World: Athenian Vase-Painting in the Early Fifth Century B.C., on view from March 4 through June 11, 2017.

The Berlin Painter and His World is a celebration of ancient Greece and of the ideals of reason, proportion, and human dignity that are its legacy. Focusing on the extraordinary work of a single anonymous master artisan, the exhibition provides a window onto ancient Athenian society at a time of economic growth and cultural flourishing through the art of vase-painting, the largest body of pictorial imagery to have survived from antiquity. Depictions of myths, cult, and daily life on red-figure vases posit questions on love and war, life and death, that still resonate today.