La ceramica italiota a figure rosse in Daunia: temi e problemi

Recent research on South Italian red-figure pottery raises the need to overcome the almost exclusive stylistic rather than typological seriation of this class of materials. If classification by attribution is inevitable for vases in which the figurative decoration is, together with the shape, a fundamental part of the objects’ function, it’s now important both to submit the attributions themselves to revision and to consider the contribution which can be provided, in understanding production and reception mechanisms, by other approaches, such as morphological and contextual analysis. Daunia represents a privileged territory for investigating, through the examination of the 'first steps' of the local productive experience, on a framework of organization and mobility of artisan work very complex and correlated to the 'market' of the manufactured articles themselves, as emerges from multiple perspectives. An exemplary sample is, in this perspective, the activity of the Lampas Group, whose peculiar appearance, starting from the morphology of the vases, returns, together with an overview of provenances and known contexts, a very interesting insight into these dynamics.