The Meidias painter also produced a series of similar pure pictures of ‘existence’ on hydriae, _e.g._, the fair Phaon, the singer ‘Thamyris,’ Paris with the goddesses, [Illustration: PLATE XCII. Fig. 153. THE GIANT TALOS OVERCOME BY THE DIOSKUROI: RED-FIGURED VOLUTE-KRATER.] the Eleusinian deities, and decorated other vases also in this manner. These scenes, on which the figures move less vigorously than the lines, are more successfully rendered than the pathos of the scene of abduction on the London hydria signed by the potter Meidias. He was no bold progressive artist; his technically exquisite and very delicately drawn pictures recast in new shapes the new phenomena of art: in him the series of masters of the type of the ‘Sotades’ painter and the Eretria master comes to an end. His contemporary, who may after the chief figure of the Satyric play vase at Naples be called the ‘Pronomos’ master, likes figures of ‘existence’ in pretty poses, but he draws them with more spirit and does more justice to the vehement style of his time. On the Naples vase, a showy volute-krater with rich profiling, he puts on the obverse the cast of an Attic theatrical performance in two almost equal rows one above the other, and thus starts a principle of composition which was taken up by the vase-painting of Lower Italy (Fig. 158). Liberal use is made of thinned colour, the centre of the scene is denoted by a white figure, the luxuriantly ornamented dresses confuse the general impression. In respect of shape and decoration one may speak of a decay of the finer tectonic sense, which reminds us surprisingly of the vases of Lower Italy. The perspective side-view of the footstool and of the tripod column are liberties taken by the great art, which generally Attic vase-painters consciously avoid so as to keep to the surface treatment. The tripod-column, which transplants us into the Theatre of Athens, as the Athena of the Panathenaic vases to the Acropolis, recurs after Polygnotan times often in the midst of mythological scenes, and brings the vases, which show it, anyhow in relation to dramatic exhibitions.