L. Bernabò Brea, M. Cavalier - La ceramica policroma liparese di età ellenistica
Muggiò Milano, 1986, pp. 1-111, figg. 1-109.

The aim of this monograph is to trace the development of the figured pottery produced at Lipari between the beginning of the Hellenistic period and the terrible destruction of 252-251 BC, which, with its barbarous massacres to which Paulus Orosius refers, marks the end of all the traditional arts and crafts in the city.
It cannot be excluded that some production of figured potters had taken place in Lipari even earlier, from the mid-4th century onwards, or even earlier, but only the local workshop of the Cefalù Painter, in the last decades of the 4th century BC, seems well documented today.

In actual fact this master, though he strongly felt the influence of the new decorative style, the so-called Gnathian style, which was then developing, was still working in the “red figure” technique. But ever more clearly he appears to us as the initiator of the local school of pottery production that, in the following generation, with the Lipari Painter, would introduce full polychromy into vase decoration.
This local school of pottery flourished in a period in which the production of figured pottery had ceased or was at least on the verge of extinction in most other pottery-producing centres in Sicily and Magna Graecia.

Some fairly precise data on the development of polychrome pottery in the first half of the 3rd century BC is given to us by Menander with the masks of his comedies and even more so by his own portrait, of which we have numerous terracotta exemplars associated with fragments of painted vases in votive pits or rubbish dumps within the area of the necropolis.
Thanks to the Lipari Painter and his school, Lipari now seems to us the greatest centre for the production of polychrome pottery in the first half of the 3rd century BC. Perhaps it was the very centre in which this technique was created and perfected.