Irene, also known as Eirene (Ειρήνη), was an ancient Greek artist about whom very little is known. She belongs to a small group of female painters of antiquity recorded by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, completed in AD 77, which is why her name matters to the history of painting: she is one of the few direct references to women creating art in that period.
Pliny describes her as the daughter of a painter and credits her with an image of a girl housed at Eleusis. No work of hers survives and no detailed account of her technique or style is preserved, so any view of her manner would be speculative. The reference data gives an birth date far earlier, around 199 BC, but this chronology does not appear in the sources and should be treated with caution.
Centuries later, on the eve of the Renaissance, Giovanni Boccaccio included her in De mulieribus claris (On Famous Women). Scholars have noted that he blended details from several artists named by Pliny and attributed to Irene further works absent from the ancient account, among them an older Calypso, the gladiator Theodorus and a portrait of Alcisthenes, a celebrated dancer.
Her legacy is mainly documentary. Her name became part of the lists of female artists of antiquity, and it is these later attributions, more than her works, that have reached us.