Unlike black-figure vase painting, which portrayed the figure in black against the red background of the clay, red-figure painting reversed that technique, and left figures and patterns unglazed on the red clay of the vase, with painted details and the background in glossy black. This made it easier to draw the human figure, which, whether dressed or nude, is depicted in realistic detail. Attic red-figure was invented by the Athenians c.530 BC and dominated the style of Greek vases during the fifth and fourth centuries. But it was in the first fifty years of red-figure painting (the archaic period) that both the style of red figure, and the symposium and hetairai which it depicted, received their classical representation. The great age of erotic vase painting had ended, therefore, before the earliest Attic literature was written, and another fifty years would pass before the birth of Plato and the first plays of Aristophanes.
This amphora, which is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is one of the very earliest vases to use red-figure technique. It is by the so-called Andocides Painter, named after the potter of the vessel with whom the painter worked. It depicts the struggle between Hercules and Apollo over the Delphic tripod, a motif that is stylistically similar to one on the pediment of the Siphnian treasury at Delphi, which can be dated 530-525 BC, and so provides a date for the beginnings of the red-figure style. Within a decade or so, as artists recorded the human body in more familiar scenes than myth and heroic legend, red-figure contributed to a revolution in the style of painting: foreshortening.
