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The motif was one of many iconographic elements that likely traveled with the red-figure technique as it spread from Athens. Painted heads decorated pottery of the Greek mainland and the Aegean starting in the late eighth century b.c., but they occur erratically and relatively infrequently, often on vases from particular workshops.
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The depiction of isolated heads on vases is not unique to southern Italy and Sicily. 1 Among the Museum’s South Italian vases are diverse examples of the most common and characteristic motif of South Italian vase painting, the isolated head, which appears as a primary or secondary decorative element on more than 7,400 pieces, well over one-third of the published corpus. Exactly how the technique was transferred from Athens to the Italian peninsula is as yet unclear, but South Italian red-figure vases were produced and used in five regions-Lucania, Apulia, Campania, Paestum, and Sicily-which share their names with their respective wares. and were decorated in the red-figure technique. The vases were made between about 440 b.c. Of the ancient vases in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, more than 430 were produced in southern Italy and Sicily, a region of the Mediterranean often referred to in antiquity as Magna Graecia (Great Greece), owing to its many Greek settlements ( fig.