The Art of Ancient Greece

2008

Central N5634 W35 W682

Baltimore: Walters Art Museum

The development and proliferation of pottery and vase painting in ancient Greece was helped by the increasing trade in olive oil. Vase painting portrayed mythical scenes and scenes from everyday life such as athletic events or weddings and Watson believes that ‘No ancient people has given us such an intimate account of themselves as the Greeks did in their vase painting’. This image of the black-figure vase (c. 520 BC), held in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, depicts Herakles’s capture of the Erymanthian boar on one side and a scene showing Dionysus, the god of wine, on the reverse.