red-figure
The intractable character of black-figure for vase-painting was resolved in about 530 by the invention in Athens of a new technique, red-figure. The drawing was now done in outline, the background blacked in and the figures reserved in the clay ground -with detail painted on where before it had been incised. Replacing the graver with the brush gave the artist a subtler line and a new range of linear expression. There was soon to be less colour, and the old sex differentiation of white = woman, black = man was lost, but by the end of the century the Pioneer Group of painters was experimenting with a rendering of anatomy which the sculptor was only later to emulate in three dimensions. The style was certainly closer to that of painting on wall or panel, but this seems not to become a major art form until the fifth century. (Boardman, 1986)