History of Art & Architecture
Nikosthenes: Innovation and Identity in Late Archaic Vase Painting
Despite decades of Greek vase painting scholarship, key questions in the field remain understudied and unanswered. Since the 19th century, the study of painted vases has attracted connoisseurs, specialists who use a method of close observation centered on the identification of the hands of individual artists. The artist Nikosthenes is mentioned in every major study on Greek painting, for example, but the priorities of traditional connoisseurship-based studies have been at odds with the atelier’s lack of a single, personal style. I argue that Nikosthenes offers to the field a new way of defining a vase painting workshop as a collective artistic brand. No scholar has attempted to bring together all of the vases marked with the Nikosthenes signature, and none has used his oeuvre to examine market influences on vase painting.
My dissertation will be the first to examine the entire corpus of Nikosthenes vases as a way of demonstrating that vase painting workshops were more than just centers where artists produced common goods in a common style; they were lively collaborative spaces where entrepreneurial and marketing ingenuity met the skill and creativity of vase painting. While less than 1% of the tens of thousands of surviving Greek vases are not signed, the Nikosthenes signature appears on a surprising number. I argue that the workshop’s unusual preoccupation with signing was the result of a desire to create a brand. My dissertation will be a new resource for scholars in the field, and it will provide an illustrative guide to the often overlooked inventive character of this workshop and its place within the history of Greek Art.