Craft Apprenticeship in Ancient Greece

Eleni Hasaki (University of Arizona)

The crafts and their artistic value remain the center of study of ancient Greek material culture, even as our attention shifts from product to the processes of production. For the ancient world, apprenticeship was the process for the transmission of technical and artistic knowledge. This paper, therefore, will survey the philological, epigraphical, and archaeological evidence on apprenticeship in ancient crafts.

From internal evidence, artists generally avoided any reference to their teachers in their signatures. In commentaries (Pliny the Elder and Pausanias), references to apprenticeship are relatively common, notably for sculpture and mural painting, but the information conveyed rarely exceeds the formulaic statement that X was the pupil of Y. In sculpture, for example, apprenticeship patterns are identified in two ways, either by single teacher-pupil attributions or, less commonly, as long chains of teacher-apprentice relationships traced back to a famous ancient artist, such as Pheidias or Polykleitos. The tradition of known apprenticeships can cover a span of many generations, each sculptor beginning as an apprentice and then becoming a teacher to a new aspiring sculptor. Such clusters of artistic tradition can include up to twelve sculptors. This craft relationship is further strengthened by a bloodrelationship, since crafts were very often family-based, with the father teaching his son or a male relative.

The apprenticeship tradition in pottery was paradigmatic for the Greeks: the potter's learning curve is often employed by philosophers as a metaphor for the steady, methodical, and patient acquisition of knowledge they sought to inculcate in their own students. Specific craft-based evidence is scanty, and we remain in darkness about the content and duration of these apprenticeships. In the case of multi-talented personalities, one only wonders how these artists learned the ropes in different media.

It is perhaps not surprising that the formative stages of apprenticeship have remained elusive in the ancient Greek culture where the notion of protos euretes in crafts was widely celebrated. Modern literature has adopted a similar attitude with its focus on the distinctive virtuosity and style of individual 'Masters.' Thus connoisseurship has been the main basis for suggested apprenticeship ties among Athenian vase-painters, sculptors of Cycladic figurines, or cutters of Athenian inscriptions. Despite its main important contributions, connoisseurship relies on the fully-developed, idiosyncratic, style of an artist/craftsman once his apprenticeship is completed. As a result, it may not be the most suitable tool to detect apprenticeship itself. By evaluating the information gained from both the ancient references and the material remains of apprenticeship, we can start formulating methodological tools, with higher analytical definition, in order to trace craft apprenticeship in antiquity.