Painted vases provide the most important visual evidence of life in ancient Greece. Drawing from the Penn Museum’s extraordinary vase collection, this four-session course will explore major themes in Greek culture and society and trace the development of Greek vase-painting, with emphasis on the pottery produced in the cities of Athens and Corinth.
The centerpiece of the course will be four of the most important Athenian vase-painters: Exekias, the Amasis Painter, the Kleophrades Painter, and the Berlin Painter. These painters decorated their vases with scenes of myth and daily life, opening a window on those subjects. The business of manufacturing and selling vases and the technology of making them will also be considered, drawing on Dr. Brownlee’s work at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens excavations in Corinth, Greece, where she has worked for many years.
The Penn Museum’s collection of vases excavated at the Etruscan site of Orvieto in the late 19th century will afford the opportunity to study archaeological “context” (the materials discovered alongside the vases). And the “provenance” (ownership history) of the Museum’s vase collection will be the starting point for investigating how Greek vases were collected in 19th-century America, especially in Philadelphia.
Ann Blair Brownlee, Ph.D., is Associate Curator in the Mediterranean Section and Adjunct Assistant Professor in Penn’s History of Art Department. She is a specialist in the archaeology of ancient Greece and has published widely on the pottery of Athens and Corinth. At present, she is studying the Museum’s collection of Attic black-figure pottery from excavations in the 1890s in the Etruscan city of Orvieto and preparing a study of the Archaic Corinthian pottery from the so-called “Potters’ Quarter” at the site of Ancient Corinth. She is interested in 19th-century collectors of antiquities, especially in Philadelphia, and in the history of museums, especially the Penn Museum and its building; she was co-author of its monumental Historic Structure Report.
$175 General | $125 Member
Register here: https://www.penn.museum/calendar/562/the-deep-dig
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