Obverse, Greeks fighting Amazons Reverse, maenad between two satyrs
In many Attic vases of the fourth century B.C., the figural decoration and the surface of the vase are no longer in the perfect harmony that earlier vase-painters were able to achieve. The bodies seem almost three-dimensional, and the composition is confused apparently in an attempt to imitate large contemporary panel and wall paintings. The addition of much white, yellow, and gilding is typical of what is traditionally known as the "Kerch style" because many such vases have been found in princely tombs in the area of Kerch in the Crimea on the northern shore of the Black Sea.
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Artwork Details
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Title:Terracotta pelike (wine jar)
Artist:Attributed to the Amazon Painter
Period:Classical
Date:2nd half of the 4th century BCE
Culture:Greek, Attic
Medium:Terracotta; red-figure
Dimensions:H. 17 in. (43.2 cm)
Classification:Vases
Credit Line:Rogers Fund, 1906
Object Number:06.1021.195
Possibly from Asia Minor (“Asie Mineur?” – Sambon 1904, p. 39, no. 113)
[Until 1906, with Cesare and Ercole Canessa, Naples, Paris, New York]; acquired in 1906, purchased from C. and E. Canessa.
Canessa, Ercole and Arthur Sambon. 1904. Vases Antiques de Terre Cuite: Collection Canessa, Bibliothèque du Musée. p. 39, no. 113, pl. VIII, Paris.
Richter, Gisela M. A. 1917. Handbook of the Classical Collection. p. 128, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Richter, Gisela M. A. 1927. Handbook of the Classical Collection. p. 161, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Schefold, Karl. 1934. Untersuchungen zu den Kertscher Vasen. no. 547, pp. 57, 118, pl. 38a, b, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co.
Richter, Gisela M. A. 1953. Handbook of the Greek Collection. pp. 115, 255, pl. 95c, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Beazley, John D. 1963[1942]. Attic Red-figure Vase-painters, Vols. 1 and 2, 2nd ed. p. 1475, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Beazley, John D. 1971. Paralipomena: Additions to Attic Black-Figure Vase-Painters and to Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters [2nd edition]. p. 1839, no. 3, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Pinney, Gloria Ferrari and Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway. 1979. Aspects of Ancient Greece no. 50, pp. 106–7, Allentown, Penn.: Allentown Art Museum.
Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (LIMC). 1981. Vol. 1: Aara-Aphlad. "Amazones," p. 609, no. 358, pl. 486, Zürich: Artemis Verlag.
Picón, Carlos A. 2007. Art of the Classical World in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Greece, Cyprus, Etruria, Rome no. 204, pp. 174, 441, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Mertens, Joan R. 2019. "Innovation in Hellenisitc Athenian Pottery : The Evolution from Painted to Relief Wares." Art of the Hellenistic Kingdoms from Pergamon to Rome, Seán Hemingway and Kyriaki Karoglou, eds. pp. 148–49, fig. 2, New Haven: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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The Museum's collection of Greek and Roman art comprises more than 30,000 works ranging in date from the Neolithic period to the time of the Roman emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity in A.D. 312.
