Some Protocorinthian Vase-Painters

Johansen in Vases Sicyoniens and Payne in Necrocorinthia and Protokorinthische Vasenmalerei isolated a number of artistic personalities, but this was, or seemed at that stage, incidental to their main object, the ordering of Protocorinthian and ‘Corinthian’ pottery by phases of chronological development. Payne left further work on painters in manuscript notes, and we and others have done something in the same line, but so far there has been no attempt to see the whole development of the style in terms of artistic personalities influencing one another (which after all it was), as has been done by Beazley for Attic red-figure and blackfigure, and by J. M. Cook for Protoattic. If such a view can be achieved it modifies the necessarily rather schematic (even Procrustean) division into chronological phases, and gives a more organic view of the development. For the ‘Corinthian’ period it is a somewhat dispiriting task, though even there we believe that it would be worth doing, if only to help our understanding of the interrelation of Corinthian and Attic. In this article, however, we are concerned only with Protocorinthian, whose general level is very high, and the principal artists of superlative quality; the isolation of painters here needs no apology.Earlier work on these lines was impeded by the fact that the miniature side of Protocorinthian has been so much better preserved and published than the parallel and contemporary ‘big style’. The balance has recently been partly righted by Kraiker's publication of material from Aigina; and the other most important body of Protocorinthian pottery—the votive deposit from the Temple of Hera Limenia at Perachora—has already been prepared for publication by Dunbabin. We have made full use of the Perachora material in this article, and the substantiation of some of our conclusions will have to await the appearance of Perachora II. There is a third, unpublished, collection of Protocorinthian ‘big style’ vases in Berlin, from Aigina.