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Lot Essay
This chalice is one of the most well-published in the corpus and provides a crucial link for the existence of Mycenaean pottery production in Cyprus during the Bronze Age. The chalice is painted with a series of horizontal bands encircling the foot, stem and cup. The upper third of the cup is decorated with a frieze of repeated bull promotes, each looking right, with the space between them filled with dotted circles. Approximately half of the foot and cup are restored in plaster, but the ancient element is comprised of one continuous, unbroken fragment.
V. Karageorghis (op. cit., 1957) was the first to recognize the hand of this artist, who he named the Protome Painter B, and assigned two other vases to him: a bowl in the British Museum from Klavdia, Cyprus, and one from Minet-el-Beida, in modern-day Syria. The chalice form is only attested in Mycenean pottery from Cyprus and the Levant, and is likely based on a metallic prototype of Near Eastern origin. Based on the form and findspot of the other two vases, Karageorghis placed the Protome Painter B’s workshop in Cyprus, which is all the more remarkable as he produced vases with pictorial decoration outside of mainland Greece. As Karageorghis remaks (op. cit., p. 41), “Indeed even staunch supporters of a mainland origin for Mycenaean pictorial vases have made a special concession with regard to this painter, and regard him as having his atelier in the Levant. With this concession, however, one has to now admit also that perfect Mycenaean fabrics…could be manufactured in the Levant."
V. Karageorghis (op. cit., 1957) was the first to recognize the hand of this artist, who he named the Protome Painter B, and assigned two other vases to him: a bowl in the British Museum from Klavdia, Cyprus, and one from Minet-el-Beida, in modern-day Syria. The chalice form is only attested in Mycenean pottery from Cyprus and the Levant, and is likely based on a metallic prototype of Near Eastern origin. Based on the form and findspot of the other two vases, Karageorghis placed the Protome Painter B’s workshop in Cyprus, which is all the more remarkable as he produced vases with pictorial decoration outside of mainland Greece. As Karageorghis remaks (op. cit., p. 41), “Indeed even staunch supporters of a mainland origin for Mycenaean pictorial vases have made a special concession with regard to this painter, and regard him as having his atelier in the Levant. With this concession, however, one has to now admit also that perfect Mycenaean fabrics…could be manufactured in the Levant."