Master of Dipylon

One calls Maître of Dipylon a painter on vase of the ancient Greece which works in the middle of eighth century BC (Recent Géométrique). It owes its name with a group of funerary vases whose majority were discovered with Athens in the Nécropole of the Céramique, close to the door of Dipylon.

Its style marks the apogee of the geometrical style, which uses the gun then human and animal representation into force: the human bust takes the shape of a triangle; the arms are represented like sticks, often in the simple prolongation on the sides of the bust; the head is a simple disc, in which the addition of a feature comes to appear the nose. The artist seems to seek with inféoder the human figure with a geometrical, carcateristic gun frequently repeated in all Greek art.

The construction of the vases of the Master of Dipylon very elaborate and is always proposed painting by the many geometrical reasons and animals laid out in registers sometimes overlapping one in another.

The art of the Master of Dipylon is narrative: the majority of its vases, of the markers of tomb (craters for the men, amphoras for the women), relate to the paunch of the funerary scenes. Fact surprising for vases of also big size, much reached us whole, which makes it possible to better apprehend its style. In two of the most important vases preserved, a517 crater of the Museum of Louvre and amphora 804 of the archaeological Museum of Ceramics, the central detail of the vase shows us a character lengthened on a bed ( klinè ), surrounded by other characters, debouts or kneel: it is the Prothêsis or taken care of death.

Indeed, a burial, in ancient Greece, is one very important moment governed by the legislators, it is a duty to remember for the family. It comprises three stages:

  • the prothêsis with the lamentations and the purification of the house;

  • the will ekphora the third day ( your trita ): the procession;
  • the ninth day ( your enata ), the family is collected around the tomb; that marks the end of mourning but fall to it remainder an important place of memory.

Prothêsis and will ekphora are two very important scenes in the repertory of the geometrical style.

The Master of Dipylon has as a great principle all showing his scene: he does not adopt only one point of view. Thus, the arms and the bust are represented of face, which enables us to admit their installation well, while the bottom of the body is shown of profile, in order to allow the separation of the legs. When it represents a bige, it shows the two wheels side by side, and the eight legs of the horses are carefully distinguished. In the style of Dipylon, no silhouette is superimposed on another: each character has his well defined place.

The painter also tries to solve the problem of the representation of a scene in space while resorting to a staging: the scene is read upwards. In bottom is illustrated the part of the scene nearest to the observer; in top that which of it is most distant. Thus, in the scene of prothêsis of A517, one understands easily that the beer is located in the middle of two lines of whining.

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