My thesis is a speculation around the women's vase-painting workshop active on the island of Lipari in the first half of the third century BCE. The existence of the workshop was identified by Madeleine Cavalier and Luigi Bernabò Brea and was one of the fruits of the archaeological research conducted by them in the second half of the 20th century on the grounds of ancient Lipara. In the publication La Ceramica Policroma Liparese di Eta Ellenisitca the excavators had named, enumerated and gendered as male all the painters of the workshop, known today under the name of the ‘Lipari Painter’.¹ The vases painted by Lipari Painters are today a part of the permanent collection of Archaeological Museum Luigi Bernabò Brea in Lipari, where, following the assumption of Madeleine Cavalier and Luigi Bernabò Brea, they are described as made by men. The aim of the thesis is to put this in question.

On the basis of reading the iconography on the vases and connecting it to the context that they were excavated from, I speculate that the Lipari Painters were women . The uniquely colourful vase painting depicts only women, whom I recognize as Thesmophorozsoui, followers of a women-only festival spread through the territories of Ancient Greek expansion.² Thesmophoria, the festival dedicated to the yearly celebration of

Demeter-Persephone myth, was closed to the male part of the population, but all surviving written ancient sources telling of the festival are neither female nor neutral. I aim to reinstate the work of the female painters’ workshop that celebrated the followers of the festival. The female painters could have taken part in the festival themselves and their work commemorating Thesmophoria might have been a unique example of women’s artistic labour in Ancient Greek art.

Author: Ania Yilmaz