vase painting
Top of the Pots
The context: techniques of painter and potter.
This will take you to a number of pages on Athenian drinking habits, and how the pots were produced. Copiously illustrated! Includes animations of the painting and firing processes.
Top of the Pots
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The current choice is London 1887.7-27.2 - a black-figure Athenian amphora probably found in Italy, and dated around 550 BC
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This famous vase is usually attributed to the Timiades Painter - whose other work (Boston 98.916) also shows extreme violence against a woman: Heracles, terrifying with his lion's head actually over his face (like a rubber bondage mask), lunges towards the cowering Andromache, queen of the Amazons, grabbing her right wrist with his left hand, while brandishing a huge sword with his right. Her sword is in her belt, and her shield is useless as she tries to run away.
The London Vase presents an even more horrific image. The context is the end of the Trojan War. Troy has fallen and all the Trojan heroes and many of the Greeks are dead. Before the survivors can return home, the ghost of Achilles demands a sacrifice, mirroring the sacrifice of Iphigeneia which enabled them to get a breeze for Troy ten tears before. Euripides uses the story for his tragedy Hecuba (Hekabe)- where the beautiful youngest daughter of Priam dies so heroically, so modestly and wins such admiration from her Greek murderers. But the Timiades painter has no time for romanticizing. Three warriors hold the girl horizontal - like a battering-ram. They are named as Amphilochos, Antiphates - and, ominously, Ajax, son of Oileus (fresh from his equally unpleasant role in the rape of Cassandra).
From the left comes Neoptolemos, son of Achilles, whose privilege it is to carry out the sacrifice. In a fantastic composite image he is simultaneously running at her (reminding me of an English public school prefect administering a beating) and standing still gripping her by the hair - holding her head up so his sword can penetrate the neck. Polyxena's face is distorted - prefiguring one of the bomb victims in Picasso's Guernica.
A scribbled spurt of blood - for which the artist has used a different colored paint - falls on the altar, from which flames painted with the identical technique rise up to meet it. Another echo is between the fabric covering the tomb with that of Polyxena's peplos - both patterned similarly. She is not quite a sexless tube: although her arms would seem to have been pinioned inside her top, she has breasts round which Amphilochus grasps her firmly and a rather pathetic little bottom. The main actors are all young: the old guard are marginalised: Nestor on the far left, and Phoenix, Achilles father-figure, turning away from the sickening scene on the far right. The other side of the pot shows young men dancing: now the sacrifice is over they can celebrate. Where does the painter stand? Does he share the physical excitement of the young warriors relishing their duty? Or is there some sympathy for the wretched object that conceals its resemblance to a girl's body?
About 125 years separate this harsh image from Euripides' play, Hecuba (produced around 425 BC). Polyxena is no passive victim now. She is brave and independent, and heroically accepts a death she cannot escape. Talthybius, the herald is describing her death to her mother (translated Vellacott):
"Let me stand free, and kill me; then I shall die free.
Since I am royal, to be called slave among the dead
Would be dishonour." The whole army roared consent;
And Agamemnon told the youths to set her free.
When she heard this, she took hold of her dress,and tore it
From shoulder-knot to waist, and showed her breasts, and all
Her body to the navel, like the loveliest
Of statues. Then she knelt down on one knee and spoke
The most heroic words of all: "Son of Achilles,
Here is my breast, if that is where you wish to strike;
Or if my throat, my neck is ready here; strike home."
He with his sword - torn between pity and resolve -
Cut through the channels of her breath. A spring of blood
Gushed forth; and she, even as she died, took care to fall
Becomingly, hiding what should be hidden from men's view.
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