MY ILLUSTRATION (Figure 3.1) shows the black-figure side of an Athenian bilingual Type A amphora, painted around 530 BC by the artist or artists conventionally known as the Andokides or the Lysippides Painter. Some of you may be aware of how many questions I beg by making what was once an unexceptionable statement about this picture. Virtually everything I have said here depends on Beazley's taxonomy – the date, the associations of the term ‘artist’, his or their conventional names, and the term ‘bilingual’, as if we were talking about a language, indeed two languages. In making these assumptions, I am working within a framework whose validity has certainly been questioned, though not, I believe, demolished; I would like to shift the ground a little by presupposing a craft tradition, rather than an artistic one, with a particular audience and a highly localised frame of reference. The quality of its products is extremely variable: the good end is a parallel to what is sometimes described as applied art today, and valued by its rather specialised clientele, and the bad end is equivalent to the dreary plague of porridge-coloured mugs (our legacy, alas, from another craft tradition) to be seen at craft-fairs up and down Britain. It is important to insist here that the aim of this industrial-craft tradition is a range of competently made, well-finished vessels, on which stock subject-matter and standardised treatments of it are a norm, desired by craftsman and customer alike. The experimental masterpieces are mavericks – we should be asking what these non-standard pieces were for, rather than suggesting that because the average craft product is a limited-run multiple it is in some sense derivative of another art form or the product of sub-standard hacks. What I want to do here is to look at the tradition as revealed in standard practice – the tools of a trade, part of whose common stock is narrative and illustrative picture-making, something which I believe develops during the sixth century BC: our picture stands at the end of it, at a point of transition.