.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
This splendid figural oinochoe is amongst the most well-known vases in the Apulian corpus, since it is featured on the covers of both parts I and II of A.D. Trendall and A. Cambitoglou’s Second Supplement to the Red-Figured Vases of Apulia. This example, which the authors considered to be of “considerable beauty” (op. cit., pt. 2, p. 189), takes the form of a female head, painted white with red and black details throughout. Above her center-parted wavy hair, she wears a thick wreath, wrapped spirally with broad fillets, stippled along their length, with the ties, in red, falling behind her ears and at the back of the neck, and with a cluster of ivy leaves and a projecting palmette on either side. Her earrings are in the form of female heads wearing a red crescentic diadem. Above the head, the vessel's shoulders and neck are ornamented with a scrolling band in added white, another in black on a reserved band, and berried laurel in added white. At the back of the head, in added white, yellow and red, is a woman seated on a chest, holding a bird and a fan, her head turned back in profile, framed by elaborate scrolling.
Trendall and Cambitoglou list many figural vases and rhyta in Chapter 21 of Red-Figured Vases of Apulia and its two supplements, associating them with the Gioia del Colle Painter and the Circle of the Darius and Underworld Painters. The authors note (The Red-Figured Vases of Apulia, p. 13) that production of such vases increased dramatically after 350 B.C., and that the red-figured head vases (sometimes referred to as “vases with plastic heads”) served as the forerunners for the polychrome types which become so popular at the end of the 4th century and into the 3rd at Canosa. Regarding the present vase, the authors inform that the seated woman at the back of the head is closely paralleled to another seated within a naiskos on a red-figured hydria associated with the Group of Copenhagen 4223 (Second Supplement to the Red-Figured Vases of Apulia, pt. 1, p. 118, no. 33b), and that “it would be difficult not to see them as products of the same workshop, if not the same artist” and therefore, this stylistic connection “has considerable implications for the dating of the plastic heads, since the hydria must belong to the third quarter of the fourth century B.C.”
Trendall and Cambitoglou list many figural vases and rhyta in Chapter 21 of Red-Figured Vases of Apulia and its two supplements, associating them with the Gioia del Colle Painter and the Circle of the Darius and Underworld Painters. The authors note (The Red-Figured Vases of Apulia, p. 13) that production of such vases increased dramatically after 350 B.C., and that the red-figured head vases (sometimes referred to as “vases with plastic heads”) served as the forerunners for the polychrome types which become so popular at the end of the 4th century and into the 3rd at Canosa. Regarding the present vase, the authors inform that the seated woman at the back of the head is closely paralleled to another seated within a naiskos on a red-figured hydria associated with the Group of Copenhagen 4223 (Second Supplement to the Red-Figured Vases of Apulia, pt. 1, p. 118, no. 33b), and that “it would be difficult not to see them as products of the same workshop, if not the same artist” and therefore, this stylistic connection “has considerable implications for the dating of the plastic heads, since the hydria must belong to the third quarter of the fourth century B.C.”