Between Art and Craft – Possibilities in the Research of Late Archaic and Early Classical Athenian Black-Figure Vase Painting

In the late archaic and early classical periods, changes can be observed in the Athenian vase painting workshops. With the appearance of the red-figure technique, the workshops still using the more archaic black-figure technique needed to adapt their production to cater to the demand of the consumers. Contrary to the red-figure vases, the black-figure ones, which consisted of a small selection of shapes produced in high numbers, bore less elaborate stock scenes. Due to the lack of details on these vases, the traditional connoisseurship put these vases on the sidelines in favour of the artistically higher quality vessels decorated by red-figure painters. In my paper, I focus on one vase painting group producing black-figure vases in this period. Through the vases of the CHC Group active in the last decade of the 6th and in the first decades of the 5th century. Examining the skyphoi with the iconographic theme of the turning chariot – one of the most numerous on the vases attributed to the group – I aim to shed some light on the individual craftsmen working in the group.