002

  • Red-figure Dish with Running Female Figure with Wreath and Ivy-garnished Phiale

  • ca. 340-330 BCE
  • Middle Apulian "Milan Orpheus Group" (South Italian) [D. Caccioli]
  • Ceramic
  • 5.8 x 24.9 x 24.9 cm., 2-3/8 x 9-7/8 x 9-7/8"
  • Catherine Carter Goebel, Paul A. Anderson Chair in the Arts Purchase, Paul A. Anderson Art History Collection, Augustana College, 2000.55

Essay by Thomas R. Banks, Professor Emeritus of Classics and Dorothy J. Parkander Professor Emeritus in Literature

In its revelation, this pot seems to anticipate a poetic form soon to be created by Theocritus (about 300–260 BCE), the eidyllon: an idyll or snapshot-like image of a unique personality caught unawares while engaged in an archetypal event of life. Theocritus' verbal portraits deliberately evoke and riddle more than they explain, suggesting the unique within the archetypal. The artifact as a whole is of red-figured pottery. That ceramic technique, whereby major shapes were left undecorated to acquire the distinctive red color of the unpainted, fired clay against a painted black background, flourished in Greece and Greek colonies from around 530 to 300 BCE (Caccioli 18). The date of this particular pot is placed more precisely to 340–330 BCE (Caccioli 18).

The shape of this pot is that of a phiale, a shallow, dish-like, handleless cup. Its function par excellence was for libation: that is, the pouring of liquid offerings to divinities and the spirits of the dead. On the rim of the interior is painted a wreath of laurel. As laurels were conventionally an award for victory, that plant would be suggestive of use at a festivity involving contests of some sort, though not definitively so. In the tondo—the inner-circle, double-banded—is centered the figure of a young woman in haste. The figure grasps in the left hand, extended ahead for balance, a decorated garland. Jane Borelli identifies this as a myrtle garland (Borelli 18), a plant associated with Aphrodite. This would put in place a second suggestion (after her phiale itself) of a festive or ritual occasion. One could assume this is a bride, hastening in preparation for the wedding that would not take place in life, hastening poignantly to a premature death and a symbolic wedding to the god of the underworld ( Caccioli 18).