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    Plate, ca. 520–510 b.c.
    Greek, Attic, red-figure
    Signed by Epiktetos as painter
    Terracotta; Diam. 7 3/8 in. (18.7 cm)
    The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, The Bothmer Purchase Fund, and Norbert Schimmel Foundation Inc. and Christos G. Bastis Gifts, 1981 (1981.11.10)

    Curator Comment

    The great vase scholar Sir John Beazley wrote, "The best of [Epiktetos] is in his plates. You cannot draw better, you can only draw differently. Epiktetos' people are all lightness and fairy grace, as if they belonged to a world where passion and pain were unknown, to those 'woods of Athens' where Oberon reigned in the days before 'the middle summer's spring'" (Attic Red-Figured Vases in American Museums [1918], p. 18).

    In ancient Athens the youth riding a rooster undoubtedly made reference to homosexual relations between older men and boys, as well as to the practice of giving a rooster as a gift.

    Joan R. Mertens, curator, Greek and Roman Art

    Provenance

    Found at Vulci, on the property of Lucien Bonaparte, 1828/29; W. W. Hope (Jean de Witte, Description d'une collection de vases peints [Paris, 1837], no. 177); sale, Christie's, London, February 13, 1849 (Archäologische Zeitung 10 [October 1849], col. 100, no. 74); second marquess of Northampton; sale, Christie's, London, July 2, 1980, no. 39; Mr. Fritz Bürki, Zurich.

    Bibliography

    John Boardman and Martin Robertson, Corpus vasorum antiquorum: Great Britain, Northampton—Castle Ashby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), no. 65; The Metropolitan Museum of Art Annual Report (1980–81),  no. 37; Carlos A. Picón et al., Art of the Classical World in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007), no. 208.

    Related Links

    Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History