A large red figure "ornate style" krater vase
Red clay with black slip. Intact anicent vase decorated with a youth in a cloak carrying a dish followed by a woman with branches and a tympanon. To the reverse two further cloaked youths. The scenes placed above a meander pattern interspersed with decorative plaques. The rim bordered by a laurel branch wreath. The handles issung from large anthemia. H 40, D ca. 40 cm.
Apulia, presumably circa 360 - 340 B.C.
The beginning of red figure vase painting in Southern Italy is dated to the third quarter of the 5th century BC. Before this, the Greek colonists imported vases and other vessels from their homeland. In 1893 Adolf Furtwängler was the first archaeologist to propose a production site in Southern Italy. His theory was proven right in 1973 during a dig in Metapont in the Bay of Tarent in which large sherds of pottery of exceptional quality were discovered. The potters may have been prompted to leave Athens in 430 BC due to an outbreak of plague, or possibly due to the dire circumstances of the Peloponnesian War, which Athens lost in the year 404. Whatever the reason, it led to the development of a flourishing production of red figure pottery in Lower Italy. The New Zealand based researcher Arthur D. Trendall began publishing on this phenomena in 1936 and continued to do so throughout his career, alongside Thomas Bertram Lonsdale Webster and Alexander Cambitoglou.
At the time of this vase's production, the connecting element of the meander was on its way to developing into the “actual Apulian ornament”, a crossed square with a dot in each quarter. The monotone colourway and two-figure compositions point to the “plain style”, but the piece also features numerous foliate and ornamental motifs.
Provenance
The Baurat Schiller Collection, Berlin, auctioned by Lepke Berlin on 19th and 20th March 1929, lot 411 (description swapped with lot 411). - Auctioned by Gerda Bassenge, Berlin, auction 21, 1973, lot 2685.
Literature
Auction cat. of the Baurat Schiller Collection, compiled by Prof. Dr. Robert Zahn, 1929, p. 131.
Cf. Trendall, Rotfigurige Vasen aus Unteritalien und Sizilien, Mainz 1991, illus. 162/163, a very similar krater attributed to the Snub-Nose paintner.