The Amasis Painter was a virtuoso who brought life to painted pottery. He painted the whole of life: men run, drink, hunt, ride horses, drive chariots, consort with Dionysos, wrestle, box, play the aulos and the lyre, dance, pay court to women and boys, masturbate, marry, put on armour, go to war, and get locked in combat; women weave, play the aulos, amorously encounter men, marry, and wave warrior husbands goodbye; dogs defecate.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Friday, July 03, 2020
The Whole of Life
Robin Osborne, Archaic and Classical Greek Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 100: