Nikosthenes: innovation and identity in late archaic vase-painting

In this dissertation, I focus on the creative and commercial activities of the Nikosthenes workshop, a Greek vase-painting enterprise that operated in Athens between 545 and 510 BCE. My research examines the objects produced by the workshop, the artists who produced them, and the different contexts in which these objects were made and found. By using a fixed set of data, the painted vases signed and/or attributed to the Nikosthenes workshop, I argue that this particular enterprise was central to a number of important developments in the art of vase-painting during the Archaic period and that non-Athenian artists were a significant part of its workforce. Moreover, I argue that the shared painted signature that appears on 149 vases from this workshop represents a savvy business that catered to customer demands and nimbly shifted its aesthetic according to varying tastes. My dissertation is the first comprehensive study devoted to the Nikosthenes workshop in over twenty years, and my research represents a major shift in method and approach to the topic. In the first chapter, I explore the artistic identity of the Nikosthenes workshop by examining what is known about artists in antiquity more generally and what has been written about Nikosthenes as an individual artist. Signatures are an important part of this discussion, in that their survival on painted vases continues to play a significant role in how scholars interpret vase-painting artists and their artistic personalities. I propose that a diverse group of artists contributed to the workshop’s identity, and I discuss their contributions in chapter two. I place these artists in their busy workshop setting by examining the evidence for their physical spaces, and I profile some of the most important Athenian and non-Athenian artists who worked therein. In chapter three, I focus on the creative developments pioneered by the Nikosthenes enterprise, and I highlight the many ways these innovations were the result of complex reinterpretation of foreign aesthetic and likely carried out by non-Athenian artists in the shop. I end the project with the fourth chapter which presents the distribution of the Nikosthenes vases, and I show how the geographical patterns indicate that there were different types of vessels going to different customers. I argue that Nikosthenes, while both an individual artist and a workshop, is best thought of as a brand that catered to the demands of a growing overseas market