The Beginnings of Sicilian Red-figured Pottery and its Relationship with Early South Italian Productions: a Reappraisal Through the Case-Study of the Himera Painter Workshop

Thanks to the new evidence recovered from the recent reappraisal of the products attribuited to the early Sicilian workshop of the Himera Painter, and in light of the general revision of early Sicilian outputs, this research aims to offer a general revision of a number of issues related to the birth of red-figured pottery in Sicily. This study has been carried forward with different methodological approaches: from stylistic analysis to iconographic studies, from quantitative and distributive data to shape studies, all the way to the revision of the contexts in which these vases were found. Comparison between old and new data has thus allowed to delineate the complexity of the early Sicilian productive landscape and its strong relationship with early Lucanian and Apulian workshops. The detailed analysis of the products of the Himera Painter workshop has permitted a revision of the chronology of this important – but still largely overlooked – early Sicilian atelier. It is in fact a productive tradition that can be situated between 420 B.C. and 409 B.C., before the destruction of the city of Himera by the Carthaginians. The new dating for the workshop of the Himera Painter allows thus a partial but significant remodelling of the timeline of the birth of the Sicilian production. Furthermore, thanks to the quantitative and spatial distribution analysis of Attic and Western red-figured pottery in Sicily, it is no longer possible to talk about a severe Sicilian “delay” by referring to the chronological gap between the first examples of red-figured pottery in Sicily (415-410 B.C.) and the oldest workshops of Magna Graecia (440-430 B.C.), as argued by A.D. Trendall.