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The Oxford Brygos cup reconsidered

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2013

Anthony A. Barrett  and
Michael Vickers
Anthony A. Barrett
Affiliation:
University of British ColumbiaAshmolean Museum, Oxford
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Extract

The name vase of the Painter of the Oxford Brygos, a fragmentary red-figure cup from Caere of the late archaic period, is well known (Plates I, IIa). Since it came to Oxford in 1911 it has been augmented from time to time by new fragments; the latest addition is a fragment formerly in New York, now on indefinite loan to the Ashmolean Museum, which was seen by Dr Dietrich von Bothmer to belong to the Oxford Brygos cup. This fragment has now been incorporated in the cup and several other pieces have been rearranged, on both sides, to good advantage. There seems to be no reason to question the identity of the artist as originally defined by Beazley. The cup is signed under the handle by Brygos as potter, but the style is quite different from that of Brygos' most frequent collaborator, the Brygos Painter. If A. Cambitoglou is correct in identifying the Brygos Painter and Potter as one and the same, we must assume that on this occasion Brygos potted for a second artist. The purpose of this article is primarily to draw attention to the restoration of the Oxford cup and to attempt a re-interpretation of the vase as a whole; it also, however, has a secondary purpose, to publish for the first time the only other vase securely assigned by Beazley to the same artist. The latter is a cup formerly on the Roman market and preserved in drawings in the German Archaeological Institute in Rome. While we do not suggest that the two cups are necessarily a pair, they do have some interesting features in common. First, the Rome cup (Plate IIb—d).

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Hellenic Studies , Volume 98 , November 1978 , pp. 17 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1978

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References

We should like to thank Dr Dietrich von Bothmer, Professor P. Devambez, Professor Martin Robertson and Professor A. M. Snodgrass for their help and advice in the preparation of this paper.

1 Oxford 1911.615. ARV 399. Herford, M. A. B., ‘A Cup signed by Brygos at Oxford’, JHS xxxiv (1914) 106–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hoppin, J. C., A Handbook of Attic Red-figured Vases (Cambridge Mass. 1919) i 113Google Scholar; Pfuhl, E., Malerei und Zeichnung der Griechen (Munich 1923) iv 434Google Scholar; Beazley, J. D., CVA Oxford i pl. 2.1 and 6.3–4, ii pl. 61.1–3Google Scholar; Delvoye, C. and Roux, G., La civilization grecque de l' antiquité à nos jours (Brussels 1967) i pl. VI (Side A)Google Scholar. Wegner, M., Brygosmaler (Berlin 1973) pl. 26bGoogle Scholar. Subsequent references to these works will be by surname only.

2 Metropolitan Museum of Art 1973.175.2 (Donated by D. von Bothmer).

3 The Brygos Painter (Sydney 1968) 11.

4 The full identity of this artist is uncertain; Beazley, , ‘Kleophrades’, JHS xxx (1910) 65Google Scholar, and Herford have detected the influence of the Kleophrades Painter, and to their observations we add a few of our own. There is a parallelism between the device of the Oxford cup interior and that of a late amphora by the Kleophrades painter (ARV 182.5; see Beazley, , The Kleophrades Painter [Mainz 1974] pl. 28.2)Google Scholar. The ‘mirror-image’ effect of the two warriors standing back to back on the cup is found also on the amphora, where two groups, each consisting of a warrior being led off the field by an elderly man, are reverse images, one of the other. The stippled head and beard of the old men on the Rome cup are reminiscent of Priam on the Kleophrades Painter's famous Ilioupersis scene (compare the Priam in the same scene by the Brygos Painter). Moreover, the experimental attempt to represent spatial depth on the Rome cup would not be out of place on a work by the Kleophrades Painter (see Robertson, M., A History of Greek Art [Cambridge 1975] 234Google Scholar).

5 ARV 399. DAI Rom R.I. M35. We are grateful to Professor H. Sichtermann for supplying photographs of the drawings in Rome and for permission to publish them. A cup in the Cabinet des Médailles (ARV 400) is said by Beazley to be related to his style.

6 See Walter, H., Griechische Götter (Munich 1971) 50, 52, 53, 60, 86Google Scholar.

7 See Walter 59.

8 ARV 592.32. Walter 65.

9 ARV 495.1. Rumpf, MZ pl. 30.5.

10 See Dunkeley, B., ‘Greek Fountain Houses before 300 B.C.’, BSA xxxvi (1935) 142–204Google Scholar.

11 ARV 406.1. Hartwig pl. 41; 42, 1.

12 ARV 407.18. Richter, G. M. A. and Hall, L. F., Red-Figured Athenian Vases (New Haven 1936) ii pl. 48Google Scholar.

13 Even greater distortions of the dimensions are possible. On the red-figure amphora by the Andocides painter, depicting Heracles and Cerberus (ARV 4.11), the ratio is over 15:1 and there are only 8 flutes in all.

14 The dates and dimensions of the archaic temples are taken from the table in Dinsmoor, W. B., Architecture of Ancient Greece (London 1950) 340Google Scholar. The dating of some of the archaic temples is controversial, but the problems of their precise dates do not affect the point made in this paper.

15 In addition to the insertion of the new fragment, there have been some minor adjustments made in the arrangement of the fragments as previously published. On Side B the upper section of the youth donning greaves and the warrior bearing a shield has been moved to the right; on Side A the left hand group has also been moved slightly to the right.

16 On the depiction of battles between Greeks and Persians in Greek art see Schoppa, H., Die Darstellung in der griechischen Kunst bis zum Beginn des Hellenismus (Coburg 1933)Google Scholar; Bovon, A., ‘La représentation des guerriers perses et la notion de barbare dans la lère moitié du Ve siècle’ in BCH lxxxvii (1963) 579–602CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Holscher, T., Griechische Historienbilder des 5. und 4. Jahrhunderts v. Chr. (Würzburg 1973) 38–48Google Scholar. Subsequent references to these works will be by surnames only. See too Schauenburg, K., ἙϒΡϒΜΕΔΩΝ ΕΙΜΙ in AM xc (1975) 97–121Google Scholar (pl. 34.2, a detail of Oxford 1911.615).

17 Assumed also by Wegner 56.

18 See Bovon 594.

19 ARV 417.4. See Gerhard, E., Auserlesene Vasenbilder (Berlin 1847) iii pl. 166Google Scholar.

20 ARV 185.1. See Caskey, L. D.—Beazley, J.D., Attic Vase Paintings (Oxford 1954) no. 70Google Scholar.

21 ARV 434.74. See Arias, P. E.—Hirmer, M.—Shefton, B. B., A History of Greek Vase Painting (London 1962) no. 144Google Scholar.

22 See Hölscher 42.

23 For lists of scenes see Schoppa 28–30, Bovon 579–87, Hölscher 38–40.

24 Hölscher 44, concludes on the battle scenes involving Greeks and Persians: ‘Ein bestimmter Vorgang oder ein einmalige historische Situation ist nirgends festgehalten.’

25 On the chronological problems presented by this information see Hölscher 34–5.

26 ARV 238.1. See Arias—Hirmer—Shefton no. 131.

27 See Jeffery, L. H., ‘The Battle of Oinoe in the Stoa Poikile: a problem in Greek art and history’ BSA lx (1965) 41–2Google Scholar, followed by Thompson, H. A. and Wycherley, R. E., The Athenian Agora xiv (Princeton 1972) 90Google Scholar.

28 ‘Un nouveau vase plastique du potier Sotadès au Musée du Louvre’ in RA (1972) 271–84.

29 In the battle scene on the cup mentioned in n. 8 there appears a curious structure that looks like a sloping pole inserted into the ground and propped up by a second pole. It could conceivably represent a γέρρον seen in strict profile.

30 Not in ARV. For an illustration see Gow, A. S. F., ‘Notes on the Persae of Aeschylus’ in JHS xlviii (1928) 153. fig. 9Google Scholar.

31 Schmidt, E. F., Persepolis (Chicago 1953) i pl. 151Google Scholar.

32 Layard, A. H., The Monuments of Nineveh (London 1853) 75Google Scholar, 8; Schäfer, H. and Andrae, W., Die Kunst des Alten Orients (Berlin 1930) 561, 2Google Scholar.

33 See Snodgrass, A. M., Arms and Armour of the Greeks (London 1967) 102Google Scholar.

34 See Lorimer, H. L., Homer and the Monuments (London 1950) 197–9Google Scholar.

35 Snodgrass, A. M., Early Greek Armour and Weapons (Edinburgh 1964) 72, 84–5Google Scholar; Catling, H. W., ‘A bronze plate from a scale-corselet found at Mycenae’ in AA (1970) 441–9Google Scholar.

36 For a list see Anderson, J. K., Military Theory and Practice in the Age of Xenophon (California 1970) 269 n. 54Google Scholar.

37 It appears on the Alexander mosaic, where the figure under Darius wears scale armour.

38 ARV 26.1. See Pfuhl 364.

39 But see now Boardman, J., ‘The Parthenon frieze—another view’, Festschrift für Frank Brommer (Mainz 1977) 39–49Google Scholar, pl. 16, where it is argued that the Parthenon frieze, with its mixture of divine and real, represents the heroisation of the Marathon dead. See especially ibid. 43–4 on the widely held belief that the gods fought beside the Athenians at Marathon and Salamis.

40 One important exception being, of course, Panathenaic prize amphoras, on which the blazons were apparently used almost as trade-marks for artists (see Robertson, M., ‘The Gorgos Cup’ in AJA lxii [1958] 64 n. 73)Google Scholar. Our main source of information for the symbolism of the shield is literary, Aeschylus, , Septem 375–652Google Scholar, where the messenger describes how the character of each of the seven captains is symbolized by his shield blazon.

41 See n. 4 above.

42 Boardman, J., Athenian Red Figure Vases: The Archaic Period (London 1975) 221Google Scholar.

43 Greece in the Bronze Age (Chicago 1964) 211, pl. 34.

44 Several of these are illustrated by Vermeule, , ‘The Vengeance of Achilles’ in Bull. MFA Boston lxiii (1965) 34–47Google Scholar.

45 ARV 1 188.59 (not in ARV 2). See Immerwahr, H. R., ‘An inscribed terracotta ball in Boston’ in GRBS viii (1967) 259Google Scholar, fig. 7.

46 ABV 144, 10. Technau, W., Exekias (Leipzig 1936)Google Scholar pl. 8b (kindly brought to our attention by Professor Martin Robertson).