Art and the Alphabet in the Times of the Dipylon Master

Abstract

In this article I propose that the introduction of the alphabet to post-Dark Age Greece, in the first years of the 8th c. BCE, led within a generation to an explosion of figurative representations in vase painting and contributed to the inception of narrative techniques that stayed with Greek art ever since. Specifically, it is suggested that the Dipylon Master may have had some knowledge of writing and that his experience with letters had repercussions in his work as a painter. The outlines of and relationship between letters in a written word must have offered him and other late Geometric artists a stimulus for pursuing these implications in the world of painting.