The Amasis Painter was one of ancient Greece's greatest vase painters, yet his own name has not been recorded, and he is known today only by the name of the potter whose works he most often decorated. A true individualist in the history of Athenian painting, he produced work distinguished by its delicacy, precision, and wit. When the Amasis Painter began his artistic career around 560 B.C., Attic black-figure vase-painting was already fully established and about to overtake Corinthian pottery in the competition for the Etruscan market. Toward the end of his extraordinarily long career around 515 or even later-the red-figure technique had been invented and was rapidly supplanting black-figure in fashion. By tracing the Amasis Painter's stylistic development from his earliest vases to his latest, this book offers a survey of Attic black-figure technique at the peak of its perfection.The book was prepared to accompany an exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1985-1986. The exhibition is the first ever to be devoted to the work of a single artist from ancient Greece, and twenty-two museums and private collectors have lent the vases on display.

In connection with the Los Angeles opening of the exhibition The Amasis Painter and His World, a colloquium and symposium were held at the Getty Museum between February 28 and March 2, 1986. An international panel of scholars presented papers on various aspects of Greek vase-painting; these papers are collected as fully annotated essays in the companion volume to the exhibition catalogue. They include an essay by Dietrich von Bothmer concerning the connoisseurship of Greek vases, as well as one by Martin Robertson on the status of Attic vase-painting in the mid-sixth century; John Boardman’s discussion of Amasis and the implications of his name; Walter Burkert’s presentation on Homer in the second half of the sixth century; and a paper by Albert Henrichs on representations of Dionysos in sixth-century Attic vase-painting.

Matheson provides the first comprehensive chronology for Polygnotos's own works, and then analyzes the distinctive, evolving Polygnotan style first isolated by Sir John Beazley, comparing this style to that of contemporary Athenian workshops and demonstrating its seminal influence on the later vase painting of southern Italy.