Cup-Skyphos with Women Harvesting Fruit

Date

500-480 BCE

Creator

The cup-skyphos was a popular type of drinking vessel in ancient Greece. Its shape is a composite of two more standard shapes, combining the sturdy foot and canted horseshoe handles of the cup, or kylix, with the deep bowl of the skyphos. The intricate decoration of the Snite cup-skyphos was achieved through a firing technique that produced the red and black color scheme so distinctive of painted Greek pottery. After the pot had been thrown on a wheel and allowed to dry, the painter applied a gloss to those areas of the vessel intended to appear black—in this case, the figural decoration and most of the body. This liquid gloss was made not from paint or other pigment but from the same clay as the vessel. Special additives such as potassium or iron oxides caused it to turn black during the complex firing process. Greek vessels were fired in a wood-burning kiln in which the oxygen supply could be closely regulated. First, an oxidizing (well-ventilated) atmosphere was introduced in the firing chamber, turning the whole pot red, including the gloss. A reducing (smoky) atmosphere then turned the glossed part of the vessel black. The unglossed parts of the vase remained red. Success with this process required great precision in timing the reducing stage, and the slightest miscalculation could result in imperfect coloration (note the slightly mottled color of the baskets). Two major painting techniques emerged from this firing process. The earliest, black-figured, was invented sometime around 700 BCE and was the technique employed in the Snite cup-skyphos. Here the gloss was used for the figural decoration, which, after firing, appeared as black silhouettes on a red background. All interior details of the figures, such as folds in the clothing or facial features, were then incised with a sharp point, or stylus, scraping away the black gloss and exposing the red clay beneath. [...] The black-figured Snite cup-skyphos depicts two identical scenes of women harvesting fruit (apples or quince?) from a tree with vine-like branches. In fifth-century-BCE Greece, vase painters became increasingly interested in genre scenes, or scenes of everyday life. Women at their work were an especially common theme of this period. Such scenes, however, were almost always set indoors and depicted women performing domestic chores such as spinning, weaving, and caring for children. These activities reflected the primary concerns of Greek women for most of their lives. In fact, respectable women from Athens (where this cup-skyphos was likely made) were largely confined to the home, rarely leaving except in the company of a male relative and during religious festivals. [...] By the fifth century BCE, the red-figured technique of vase painting had largely superseded the black-figured as the premier painting style in Athens. Several painters continued to use the black-figured style well into the fifth century BCE, but almost all of them worked exclusively with smaller pots. One of these painters, called the Haimon Painter, is known to have worked in Athens during the second quarter of the fifth century BCE. His work is characterized by repetitive scenes with little or no incision and is mostly found on skyphoi and lekythoi, both of which were produced in mass quantities in Athens at this time. Two cup-skyphoi attributed to the manner of the Haimon Painter (now in Geneva, Switzerland, and Nauplion, Greece) are painted with harvest scenes very similar to those of the Snite piece. from Rhodes, Eclectic Antiquity: The Classical Collection of the Snite Museum of Art (Notre Dame, 2010)