Created by an artist known as the Leningrad Painter, the front of this vessel shows a young couple embracing as three other young women look on. Intimate scenes of couples kissing are unusual in Greek art, especially for women of the Athenian upper class, indicating that the participants depicted here are probably courtesans known as hetairai. Under the foot is an incised letter - upsilon, lambda or gamma - presumably a very simple trader’s mark.
This vase is decorated in the red-figure technique. Invented in Athens around 530 BCE, the red-figure technique reverses the decorative black-figure scheme. While both techniques applied a gloss, or slip made from refined clay, to all areas intended to be black, the figures here are now reserved, or left in the color of the clay, which was then intensified by the application of an orange overwash. Barely discernible are sketch marks, as well as lines of thicker gloss outlining the contours of the figures. The drapery, jewelry, and anatomy are rendered in gloss that is diluted and therefore thinner. Except for the bands of decoration—for example, the egg motif at the rim, the ivy band around the neck, and the meander pattern below the figural scene—the rest of the vase was coated with gloss. It was so thinly applied in some places that the marks of the brush are visible. Red and white details were sometimes added, and the undecorated portions of the vase were coated with gloss. They were fired in the same process as black-figure vases.
Date
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Gift of Martin A. Ryerson through The Antiquarian Society
Reference Number
1911.456
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Wilhelm Fröhner, Collection van Branteghem: Vases peints et terre cuites antiques (Paris 1892), no. 88.
Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago, vol. V (January 1912), p. 46.
John D. Beazley, Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters, vol. I (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1963), p. 399, no. 82.
John D. Beazley, Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters, vol. II (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1963), p. 572, no. 88.
Warren G. Moon and Louise Berge, Greek Vase-Painting in Midwestern Collections (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1979), No. 97, pp. 170-171.
Louise Clark, “A Rare Textile Frame on Vases at The Art Institute.” (Paper: April 17, 1979), pp. 1-7.
Louise Clark, “Notes on small textile frames pictured on Greek vases,” American Journal of Archaeology 87 (1983) 95, pl. 16, 7.
Ian Jenkins and Dyfri Williams, “Sprang Hair Nets: Their Manufacture and Use in Ancient Greece”, American Journal of Archaeology 89 (1985), pp. 416 and 417 no. 4.
Angelika Dierichs, Erotic in der Kunst Griechenlands (Antike Welt, 19, Sondernummer 1988) p. 55, fig. 87.
John Griffiths Pedley, Ancient Art at The Art Institute of Chicago. The Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1 (1994), pp. 42-45 (ill.), no. 26.
Stefan Schmidt, Rhetorische Bilder auf attischen Vasen, Visuelle Kommunikation im 5. Jahrhundert v. Chr. (Berlin 2005), p. 253, fig. 124.
Alan W. Johnston, Trademarks on Greek Vases: Addenda (Oxford 2006), p. 98, 18C no. 8a.
Sheramy Bundrick, “The Fabric of the City: Imaging Textile Production in Classical Athens”, Hesperia 77 (2008), pp. 298-9, fig. 7.
Allison Glazebrook and Madeleine M. Henry, eds., Greek Prostitutes in the Ancient Mediterranean, 800 BCE - 200 CE (Madison 2011), p. 37, fig. 2, 1.
Karen B. Alexander, “From Plaster to Stone: Ancient Art at the Art Institute of Chicago,” in Recasting the Past: Collecting and Presenting Antiquities at the Art Institute of Chicago, by Karen Manchester (Art Institute of Chicago/Yale University Press, 2012), pp. 26, 38.
Art Institute of Chicago, Ancient Art Galleries, Gallery 155, April 20, 1994 - February 6, 2012.
Art Institute of Chicago, Of Gods and Glamour: The Mary and Michael Jaharis Galleries of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Art, Gallery 151, November 11, 2012 - present.
Alphonse van Branteghem, Brussels, by 1890; sold, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, May 30-June 1, 1892, lot 88, to Martin A. Ryerson (1856-1932), Chicago; given to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1911.
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