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Lot Essay
The body of this elegant oinochoe features a wedded pair in a quadriga moving to the right. The bride grasps and raises her veil, revealing herself to her husband (anakalypsis). To the far right is another draped female. Beside the procession is Apollo playing his kithara and Dionysos with a large drinking horn. A kalos inscription – not related to the scene depicted – descends vertically along the right edge of the panel and praises Stesileos. His name is known from kalos inscriptions on two other vases, a hydria and an amphora, both in Berlin (see J.D. Beazley, Attic Black-Figure Vase-Painters, p. 675).
According to J.H. Oakley (p. 63 in E.D. Reeder, ed., Pandora’s Box: Women in Classical Greece), these scenes show the procession between the bride’s father’s house and the groom’s, and represent “the crucial moment of transition for the bride, when she leaves her old home for the new.” While the same scheme is frequently employed to show the procession of Peleus and Thetis – the paradigm of the Greek wedded couple – without identifying inscriptions or attributes, it is impossible to identify the pair presented here. Oakley observes that the presence of gods does not imply that the pair are immortals: the “mix is clearly meant to raise the status of the bridal couple, in a manner similar to that found in ancient Greek wedding songs, where they are often compared to gods and heroes.”
The Rycroft Painter takes his name from an amphora previously in the Rycroft Collection, later in the Spencer-Churchill collection (see p. 335, no. 1 in Beazley, Attic Black-Figure Vase-Painters).
According to J.H. Oakley (p. 63 in E.D. Reeder, ed., Pandora’s Box: Women in Classical Greece), these scenes show the procession between the bride’s father’s house and the groom’s, and represent “the crucial moment of transition for the bride, when she leaves her old home for the new.” While the same scheme is frequently employed to show the procession of Peleus and Thetis – the paradigm of the Greek wedded couple – without identifying inscriptions or attributes, it is impossible to identify the pair presented here. Oakley observes that the presence of gods does not imply that the pair are immortals: the “mix is clearly meant to raise the status of the bridal couple, in a manner similar to that found in ancient Greek wedding songs, where they are often compared to gods and heroes.”
The Rycroft Painter takes his name from an amphora previously in the Rycroft Collection, later in the Spencer-Churchill collection (see p. 335, no. 1 in Beazley, Attic Black-Figure Vase-Painters).