No group of Athenian vase painters has received more scholarly attention than the so-called Pioneers, the early painters in the red-figure technique working from its invention ca. 530 B.C. to about 490/480 B.C., the height of the late archaic period in Greek art. Among the Pioneers the best known by far is Euphronios, one of the few ancient Greek artists to be given a solo exhibition and still the holder of the record price for a Greek vase. The Pioneers and their vases are also the focus of Richard Neer’s book, chosen because he sees in certain exceptional peculiarities of their style and iconography a deliberate formal ambiguity, irony, and playfulness that have been ignored by other scholars but are important as expressions of ideology. In support of his interpretation, Neer relates these Pioneer traits to similar manifestations of playfulness and ambiguity in the poetry and drinking songs of the late archaic Greek symposium. Exploring the development of “naturalistic” techniques, self-portraiture, and overtly political iconography on Pioneer vases, he argues that such deliberate ambiguity in these realms undermines traditional notions of naturalism in Greek art and expresses the instability of civic identity—of both maker and patron—in Athenian society during and after the Democratic revolution of the late sixth century B.C.

The book, well illustrated and with an extensive bibliography, consists of four chapters, which lay out the argument, and two appendices, which address the debate around two assumptions on which the argument is grounded. The first assumption, that these vases were used at elite symposia, depends on the link between poetry and archaic Greek vases as well as on Neer’s thesis that Pioneer iconography is directed toward aristocratic patrons. In support of his assumption, the author marshals an array of ancient literary sources referring to aristocratic use of Greek pottery, effectively disputing, as many scholars have done, the proposal that Athenian terracotta vases were merely copies of the silver vessels used by aristocratic patrons at symposia. The second assumption extends the date range of the Pioneers into the 480s, by counting as part of the group vase painters such as Douris, Onesimos, and the Berlin and Brygos Painters who trained with or are generally viewed as descended from the Pioneers. This makes the Pioneers’ late works contemporary with other “more progressive craftsmen” (6) working in a “post-Pioneer style” (195).

Neer begins his argument by mining the language of the Greek symposium as it occurs in archaic Greek poetry to establish a vocabulary for describing the style and subjects of Pioneer vases. Sympotic poetry’s riddles, puns, elaborate metaphors, and “self-fashioning” of characters into varying, shifting roles, he argues, are paralleled on the Pioneer vases and create a deliberate ambiguity in both. 

Chapter 2 analyzes the Pioneer vases in the context of the symposium. Focusing first on the revolutionary foreshortening for which the Pioneers are known, Neer identifies a “fascination with the mechanics of depiction” (2) and a playful style that result in “visual punning” (2), the equivalent of the wordplay found in sympotic poetry. A foreshortened foot that violates the foreground picture plane, a single line that defines both a pectoral muscle and an armpit, playing with scale, eliminating natural space, and decorative ornament that enters the narrative space: these are just a few instances of such punning.

Neer detects a second sympotic theme—the self-fashioning and role-playing of the symposium’s poetry and drinking songs—on vases that depict symposiasts in Lydian dress. Many have argued that the symposium, its furnishings, and the behavior of its participants reflect older, Near Eastern dining practice. The Greek poet Anakreon describes himself as Lydopatheis, or “Lydia-mad” (Neer’s translation), and vases show him and his companions in Lydian costume. Athenian aristocrats mimicking the poet and his friends appear on vases parading in Lydian dress through the streets of Athens in the postsymposium procession known as the komos, revealing for Neer the aristocratic role-playing of the symposium. The rich, highly decorated settings in which symposia are portrayed on vases underscore their elite character.

Chapter 3 focuses on a small (eight in number) but well-known group of representations—“portraits”—of vase painters and potters on vases, including one self-portrait, and on vase inscriptions that refer to or in some cases address the same vase painters and potters. Both occur only on works from the Pioneer group. Included in the former are portraits of Euphronios, Euthymides, Sosias, and Smikros, each painted by another Pioneer; the self-portrait is by Smikros. What interests Neer is the social context in which the vase painters and potters appear: as a symposiast, as an athlete in the palaistra, as a student, and as a warrior, all of which are elite, aristocratic activities. There is no external evidence that Athenian vase painters actually participated in such activities; ancient literary sources indicate that the craftsmen in the potters’ quarter were of lower class, and signatures on vases suggest that some were foreigners and slaves. Thus these vases are not representing what actually happened, but something more like society turned upside down. Yet they were symposium vessels destined for aristocratic use and must have had an appeal to aristocratic patrons.

In response to this apparent contradiction, Neer argues that these vases evoke and even represent the instability of Athenian society after the Democratic revolution in the late sixth century B.C. In the new democracy, Athenian citizens, now “equal under the law,” were redefining their civic and personal identities. What Neer sees in earlier Pioneer vases as sympotic self-fashioning now becomes an exercise in civic ideology. In a democracy based on social mobility, artisans could join the elite. The vase painters reveled in the idea, and their elite patrons, rather than despairing that everyone was now a worker, took refuge in the idea that all were now aristocrats.

In the fourth chapter, Neer focuses on Athenian civic iconography, particularly on early fifth-century vases with scenes of voting, images related to the assassination of the tyrant Hipparchos by Harmodios and Aristogeiton (“The Tyrannicides”), and depictions of the Athenian hero Theseus. The author sees in these, as in the potter-portrait scenes, a reflection of the instability of Athenian society in the years following the Democratic revolution. All of the eight known Tyrannicides vases reflect the famous statue of the two tyrant slayers the famous statue of the two tyrant slayers by Kritios and Nesiotes that was erected in the early 470s in the Athenian Agora and, on the surface, celebrate the ultimate defeat of the Tyrants. Thucydides and others indicate, however, that different political factions held differing opinions of the motives of the Tyrant Slayers in Classical Athens, ranging from a purely heroic strike for democracy to a personal response to private jealousy and insult. Both the statue and the vases presumably reflect the same ideology, but it is impossible to recover which view was intended. Neer regards this as a deliberate continuation of the visual ambiguity of the Pioneers.

Theseus, on the other hand, as her king in the city’s glorious mythic past and her savior at the Battle of Marathon in 490, was far more clearly a hero of Athens. Scenes of Theseus, including cycles of his Herakles-like deeds and several vases referring to his filial relationship to Poseidon, have been interpreted as reflecting the hero’s prominence in the new democracy after Marathon and especially under Kimon. To Neer, the Deeds cycles relate to athletic scenes and thus to aristocratic activity, and the link with the gods that the Poseidon scenes reflect, as well as other scenes in which Theseus appears as King of Athens with other mythic Athenian kings, appropriate the hero for the aristocracy. That he could be seen by others as the hero of Marathon, and thus the savior for all of Greece, confirms, in Neer’s view, the deliberate ambiguity of these vases and its effectiveness as a mode of expression in politically unstable times.

Neer stretches his own Pioneer chronology to discuss ambiguity in the Tyrannicides and Theseus vases, which go into the 470s and 460s. He could have gone further still. Ambiguity of form parallels ambiguity of content in the Classical period as well, leaving many seemingly self-evident subjects open to a wide variety of interpretations, although under Perikles it is unlikely to have evoked an instability of society comparable to that of the new democracy. Ambiguity of subject as a vehicle for political expression also existed in black-figure vase painting. It is thus neither limited to the Pioneers nor revolutionary with them.

The Pioneers’ fascination with extravagant naturalism and playful details was, however, new. Neer defines its purpose as being to create pictorial tension (e.g., between vase surface and image, or the realistic and the fantastic) and “depictive paradoxes and ambiguities” (5), and to “fragment the picture-field” (5, 183)—in other words, to conceptualize differences. This purpose must be examined in the wider context of Greek art to determine if it is indeed revolutionary, as is claimed. Neer does this, but he defines as his standard the “traditional, progressive account of Greek art as the discovery of a rational, empirical way of registering ‘normal’ optical experience” (5). Unfortunately, this definition neither justly represents current scholarship nor properly recognizes the range of goals and ideologies embodied in the evolving naturalism of Greek art. Neer is probably correct in saying that the Pioneers used naturalism for a different purpose than did later Greek artists—the change from archaic to Classical sculpture manifest in the naturalism of the Kritios Boy could hardly be called playful—but Pioneer naturalism was a self-referential moment limited to a select group of vase painters and did not continue beyond them. It was not a lasting revolution.

Neer has effectively focused our attention on some of the more remarkable stylistic and iconographic traits of the Pioneer vases and has linked them convincingly to contemporary poetry from the Greek symposium. In doing so he has enriched our understanding of these vases, but the sample he has analyzed is probably too small and the extraordinary nature of the Pioneer vases too evident to allow the comprehensive conclusions that he draws. In the end, the Pioneers remain exceptional.