Interior and exterior, Theseus in Poseidon's undersea palace and his arrival in Athens
The subject of the decoration is elucidated in a poem by Bacchylides, active in the fifth century B.C. On the interior and one side of the exterior, Theseus, who is bound for Crete to kill the Minotaur, takes leave of his father and stepmother, Poseidon and Amphitrite. On the other side, the victorious Theseus is welcomed back to Athens by Athena.
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Artwork Details
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Title:Terracotta kylix (drinking cup)
Artist:Attributed to the Briseis Painter
Period:Classical
Date:ca. 480 BCE
Culture:Greek, Attic
Medium:Terracotta; red-figure
Dimensions:H. 5 3/16 in. (13.2 cm) width with handles 15 3/8 (39.1 cm) diameter 12 1/16 in. (30.7 cm)
Classification:Vases
Credit Line:Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1953
Object Number:53.11.4
Alfieri, Nereo. 1959. "Grande Kylix del Pittore di Pentesilea con Ciclo Teseico." Rivista dell'Istituto Nazionale d'Archeologia e Storia dell'Arte, 8: p. 67.
Beazley, John D. 1963[1942]. Attic Red-figure Vase-painters, Vols. 1 and 2, 2nd ed. p. 406, no. 7, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
von Bothmer, Dietrich. 1970. "Reports of the Departments." Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 29(2): p. 83.
von Bothmer, Dietrich. 1972. Greek Vase Painting: An Introduction. no. 26, pp. 52–53, 71, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
von Bothmer, Dietrich. 1972. "Greek Vase Painting." Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 31(1): no. 22, pp. 52–53, 68.
Barron, John P. 1972. "New Light on Old Walls the Murals of the Theseion." The Journal of Hellenic Studies, : p. 40 n. 148.
Barron, John P. 1972. "New Light on Old Walls the Murals of the Theseion." The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 92: p. 40 n. 148.
Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (LIMC). 1981. Vol. 1: Aara-Aphlad. "Amphitrite," p. 730, no. 76, pl. 590, Zürich: Artemis Verlag.
Harrison, Evelyn B. 2000. "Eumolpos Arrives in Eleusis." Hesperia, 69(3): pp. 271–73, 276, figs. 4–7.
Hedreen, Guy Michael. 2001. Capturing Troy: The Narrative Functions of Landscape in Archaic and Early Classical Greek Art. p. 52, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Picón, Carlos A. 2007. Art of the Classical World in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Greece, Cyprus, Etruria, Rome no. 111, pp. 104, 428, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Calame, Claude. 2009. "Thésée l'Athénien au Metropolitan Museum of Art de New York: Scènes Étiologiques de Légitimation et Questions de Méthode." An Archaeology of Representations: Ancient Greek Vase-Painting and Contemporary Methodologies, Dimitrios Yatromanolakis, ed. pp. 98–127, figs. 1a-c, Athens: Institut du Livre, A. Kardamitsa.
Ekroth, Gunnel. 2009. "Why (not) Paint an Altar? A Study of Where, When and Why Altars Appear on Attic Red-figure Vases." The World of Greek Vases, Vinnie Nørskov, Lise Hannestad, Cornelia Isler-Kerényi, and Sian Lewis, eds. pp. 97–98, fig. 7, Rome: Quasar.
Mertens, Joan R. 2010. How to Read Greek Vases. pp. 84–5, fig. 33, New York: 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.
