Acheloos Painter

The Acheloos Painter, active around 525–500 BCE in Athens, was a vase painter of the black-figure style. This painter's scenes were like those of the Leagros Group; however, unlike the Group's work, the Acheloos Painter's themes are comic episodes, similar to modern cartoons. Herakles was a favorite topic, as were banqueting scenes. The banqueters were portrayed satirically: overweight, aging, bearing huge, jutting noses, and so on. The heroic is made anti-heroic by parody. The artist's preferred vase forms are amphorae and hydriae.

Name vase
The name vase of the Acheloos Painter depicts a fight between the river god Acheloos, and Heracles. The vase was formerly Amphora F 1851 in the Berlin Antique collection, and is now missing. In this comic depiction, the screaming and frightened river god, in the form of a horned centaur, is kept from escaping by an unflustered Herakles pulling him back by the horns. Hermes, stock messenger of the gods, sits at ease. His long, projecting beard juts out parallel to his long, projecting nose. In the heroic scenes of Greek mythology, a hero ought to be victorious over awful and implacable monsters according to the will of the divine gods. In this scene and others like it, the hero demeans himself with a craven and ridiculous monster while the caricature of divinity slumps over in a state of ennui. "Nonsense inscriptions" have nothing to say.

In an unrelated scene on the opposite side, a hoplite and an archer say goodbye to their aged parents. The wrinkles are shown in the mother's neck. The hoplite's shield covers him up to his nose. On it is emblazoned an isolated running leg with a naked buttock. A dog sniffs at the hoplite's groin region.