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Lot Essay
Vases of the Tyrrhenian Group were made in Athens primarily for the Italian export market, especially for customers in the Etruscan cities of Caere and Vulci (“Tyrrhenian” is derived from the Greek word for the Etruscans, “Tyrsenoi”). According to J. Boardman (pp. 36-37 in Athenian Black-Figure Vases), “Now Athens entered the competition seriously with a line aimed at a market conditioned already to Corinth’s colour and animal friezes, and becoming accustomed to Athens’ interesting range of myth and genre scenes.” The favored form was the amphora, which, as Boardman notes, was a shape not well supplied by Corinth and perhaps travelled “filled with prime Attic oil.”
The body of the present amphora is divided into three registers. On the upper register on the obverse, Herakles is shown battling a centaur, flanked by a draped woman and youth on each side. Herakles wears a short tunic and the lion’s skin, holding a sword in one hand and grasping the centaur’s hair with the other; another sword is sheathed at his side. The centaur may be Nessos, who tried to abduct Herakles’s wife, Deianeira. The centaur, holding a boulder, falls on one knee. On the reverse are four helmeted warriors and a centaur in combat. The warriors are depicted nude and wearing greaves, but for the two rightmost who wear a cuirass rendered in added red. Nonsense inscriptions fill the space on both sides. The two lower registers are composed of encircling bands of sirens, sphinxes, deer, panthers, lions and swans.
The Fallow Deer Painter was first recognized by D. von Bothmer in 1944 and takes his name from the white dots along the backs of the deer, as visible on the lower register here. Heesen (op. cit., 1996, p. 43) further comments that “the attribution of this particular ‘Tyrrhenian’ amphora to the Fallow Deer Painter is partly based on the panthers which have, as it were, a ‘sleepy’ expression, as if they had just been awoken by light.”
The body of the present amphora is divided into three registers. On the upper register on the obverse, Herakles is shown battling a centaur, flanked by a draped woman and youth on each side. Herakles wears a short tunic and the lion’s skin, holding a sword in one hand and grasping the centaur’s hair with the other; another sword is sheathed at his side. The centaur may be Nessos, who tried to abduct Herakles’s wife, Deianeira. The centaur, holding a boulder, falls on one knee. On the reverse are four helmeted warriors and a centaur in combat. The warriors are depicted nude and wearing greaves, but for the two rightmost who wear a cuirass rendered in added red. Nonsense inscriptions fill the space on both sides. The two lower registers are composed of encircling bands of sirens, sphinxes, deer, panthers, lions and swans.
The Fallow Deer Painter was first recognized by D. von Bothmer in 1944 and takes his name from the white dots along the backs of the deer, as visible on the lower register here. Heesen (op. cit., 1996, p. 43) further comments that “the attribution of this particular ‘Tyrrhenian’ amphora to the Fallow Deer Painter is partly based on the panthers which have, as it were, a ‘sleepy’ expression, as if they had just been awoken by light.”