Around 530 BCE, in a workshop in Athens, a potter named Andokides and the painter who worked with him began leaving their figures in the natural orange of the clay and painting the background black. That reversal is called red-figure painting, and it replaced the older black-figure method in which the figures were black on an orange ground. It allowed fine lines inside the figures and more natural poses. The Metropolitan Museum of Art owns this amphora, which is signed by Andokides and attributed to the painter now called the Andokides Painter.
The main scene shows a quarrel over a sacred object. Herakles, a muscular, bearded hero, swings his club over his head, while the god Apollo, armed with a bow, holds on to the other side of the Delphic tripod. This is the famous episode in which Herakles tries to carry off the tripod from Apollo's oracle at Delphi. Women stand at both edges of the scene. According to the Met, Athena is there as Herakles' protector. On the other side of the jar, Dionysos stands between a satyr and a maenad.
The jar is a mix of old and new. On the white lip around the neck, in the older black-figure style, is a small scene of Herakles strangling the Nemean lion, and the Met notes that the vase combines both techniques and was probably decorated by two different artists, with the lip painted by Psiax.
The Andokides amphora appears on our: