The original German CVA Beiheft appeared in 2002, like this one the outcome of a conference at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. Its papers were designed to look at the history and purpose of the CVA itself and to enlarge on some of the categories of information it provided – vase-shapes, making, painting practice, pattern-work, inscriptions and collection history. Its overview papers engaged, among other things, with the usefulness of the series to scholars of its material.

This volume also might well be read as an overview or update on current perceptions of the state of play on ancient Greek workshops and their structures. We have here a group of papers that represent the outcome of another conference at the Bavarian Academy in October 2014, under the title ‘Maler, Schule, Werkstatt’, designed to explore the organisation of the ancient ceramic industry, and current and past perceptions of it and especially the status of the painters in relation to the potters. S. provides a perceptive and balanced overview of the history of the debate and the major players in this field, offsetting J. Beazley and his predecessors against contemporary practitioners and methodologies. D. Graepher follows with a critique of the connoisseur approach, not least as played out in Beazley's terminology. Our problem is, as ever, that the only evidence we have for the individual maker is the pots themselves: no written documentation exists to confirm the reality of any of the proposed working environments in which they were made.

Then begin the papers that explore and critique some of the academic methodologies which scholars pursue despite the essential problem: the sense and value of attribution, the nature of a perceived style, the contribution of minor hands, co-operative work on single vases, trade organisation of the outputs and practice away from Athens.

J.H. Oakley builds on a pattern of work which he followed in his publications on the Achilles Painter and the Phiale Painter, by issuing lists of new attributions to both; his view is that new subject matter, for example, or rare or new shapes may enlarge understanding and give new information about workshop, painter and practice. This paper presents its material as ‘some new takes on old themes’, but also makes a powerful case for maintaining attribution as a tool for expanding knowledge and understanding, supported by a number of interesting specific cases as further updates on his attribution lists. S.D. Pevnick uses the Syriskos Painter and the Copenhagen Painter to explore the notion of individual style, and to adjust Beazley's configuration of their work: the outcome is an argument for their identity as a single painter with a capacity for stylistic adaptation, often to the size of the vessel carrying the images. Other examples of painters with a ‘large’ and a ‘small’ style may support the conclusion. V. Stissi argues for an extension of traditional classification and attribution to explain workshop practice; he comments informatively on excavation evidence, self-reflective imagery and the growing use of statistical and quantitative approaches, and arrives at a view of a Kerameikos populated by very large numbers of skilled and specialised workers. His paper is followed by D. Williams’ contrasting portrait of the industry as family-based, with a hierarchy founded on age, experience and training.

A central issue for many of the participants, understandably, is the relationship between painters and potters, and how far the product can provide evidence of specialisms and collaboration in the craft. S. Karl's deconstruction of the relationship between the Geometric Dipylon Painter and the eponymous Workshop leads into a group of papers that look at this issue via illustrative case studies. A. Bukina looks at Corinthian workshops through the glass of H. Payne's attribution system and its successors and critics, with particular attention to the notion of a division between the painters of animal vases and those of figured pieces, probably rightly concluding that the same workers did both. A. Mackay explores evidence of collaborative divisions of work between figure painting and production of subsidiary patterns in the workshops of Group E and Exekias, and makes some convincing suggestions about the assignment of the reverse scenes on some of the vessels to a second painter – perhaps an interesting reversion to a sense of a workshop like that of Rubens. B. Kreuzer's paper on the Leagros Group looks at the possibility of specialist potters for specific shapes, and A. Schöne-Denkmayer considers human and animal head-vases: the illustrations for both these papers demonstrate very evident production lines. W. van der Put uses the exported lekythos to look at the distribution patterns of the work of a number of identified black- and red-figure Athenian workshops, and to propose a possible view of marketing strategies and user-groups, with suggestions for further methodologies to expand our understanding of this market. C. Jubier-Galinier looks at late black-figure decoration in the light of problems of inter-connection between painters and workshops, not least in the production of repetitive series of vessels.

A move to the fourth century allows M. Langner to explore later Athenian red-figure painting, and he arrives at an industry constructed around interrelated workshop groups including identified painters. K. Kathariou studies the outputs of the Jena Painter's workshop to make a link between mass-produced and individualised work, using examples of the same shapes in black-glaze and presumably higher-end pieces in red-figure. E. extends his work on the social impact of the late fourth-century ceramic industry in a study of the Amazon Painter workshop. F. Silvistrelli looks at Metapontine red-figure workshops to trace a gradual extension of skills, often influenced in the early stages by Athenian imports, with a strong shift in the latter part of the fifth century to an original and local style of painting and content, new shapes and division of specialised skills between potters and painters, with the potters as the major players in the evolution.

This group of papers can be read as an overview of a variety of evolving ways of looking at, and perhaps controlling, elements of a vast material base. All the contributions indicate continuing commitment to exploration and expansion of the field, and an encouraging tendency to look at new strategies for doing so.