Some New Perspectives on the Study of Craftspeople Mobility in the Red-figure Pottery Production of Magna Graecia and Sicily

The pottery industry is one of the most important reality in the ancient world to address issues of knowledge transfer and mobility. Nowadays, the study of the ancient itinerant workers and the dynamics of craftsmen’s mobility needs to take into account also the case-study of the red-figure workshops in Southern Italy and Sicily (5th-4th century BCE). These workshops, with their extensive networks of itinerant specialists, are ideal to investigate training, collaboration, apprenticeship and mobility from new archaeological perspectives in light of their different industrial and cultural system than the most investigated Attic ones. Doing this, contrary to the Trendall’s approach based only on stylistic analysis aiming to define single painters, the problem must be moved from research on individual personalities to a concrete analysis of possible groups, relationships, dependencies, elements that can explain the existence of a complex productive network. In fact, there are large workshops, made up of a few figures of masters with proven design skills, but also of a large number of collaborators with different specializations, also with regard to the shaping of the pottery itself. The component of the potter could in fact be fundamental to capture certain usual associations of shape and image, to allow to verify possible connections between different productive traditions and, consequently, to hypothesize the direction of some craft movements. In this complex general picture, while the potter is configured as the fixed part, the painter is instead the moving part, the one - we could say – with an ‘itinerant’ aptitude within a complex and varied productive network. These collaborations and interactions sometimes make the traditional methodology of identifying painters rather inexplicable. For example, the complex Sicilian production network, characterized by a rather dense interweaving with other geographical areas, allows us to capture a process of artisanal mobility that is increasingly multidirectional; with departures, arrivals, and stops, even only temporary. Within this framework, it is in fact salutary to mention the workshop of the Himera Painter, whose training in Apulia is hypothesized, or that of the Locri Painter that, on the other hand, would start from Sicily and then move to the Ionian area, or the one of the Santapaola Painter which, perhaps, starting again from Himera and passing through Lipari - a crucial crossroads for that period -, is also attested in Campania with "new" shapes compared to the Sicilian production. Also the workshop of the Chequer Painter is worth to mention – which through a dense network of interconnections between Campania and Sicily – manages to trigger a real new production process stable and anchored to the territory, in Sicily, in the area of Syracuse. These case-studies can constitute good starting-points to address new goals in the study of these archaeological evidences, focusing more and more attention to some neglected aspects like the mobility and the itinerant attitude of South Italian and Sicilian red-figure painters.