Spivey - The Sarpedon krater: the life and afterlife of a Greek vase

THE SARPEDON KRATER

Nigel Spivey

AN APOLLO BOOK

www.headofzeus.com

Once the pride of New Yorks Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Sarpedon krater is a wine-mixing bowl crafted by two Athenians Euxitheos (who shaped it) and Euphronios (who decorated it) in the late sixth century BC. The moving image that adorns the krater, depicting the stricken Trojan hero Sarpedon being lifted from the battlefield by Sleep and Death, was to have an influence that endured well beyond Antiquity.

Nigel Spivey not only explores the particular culture that produced the krater, but also reveals how its central motif was elaborated throughout classical antiquity and then reworked as a Christian tableau. The Sarpedon Krater is both the extraordinary story of a small and occasionally scandalous object, once consigned to the obscurity of an Etruscan tomb, and a fascinating case study of the deep classical roots of the ideas and iconography of Western art.

As vases go, the Sarpedon krater is relatively large. As landmarks go, it is almost ridiculously small standing just over 45 centimetres (18 in) high (Plates 13). How can an object of such size be categorized along with those monuments we usually regard as landmarks Stonehenge, the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China?

It is a claim of the present series that the term landmark may be extended to works of art that are not architectonic structures so including certain pieces of music, pictures and literary texts. Even in that extended sense a terracotta vessel would seem an unlikely candidate to be considered a landmark. Anyone who sees the Sarpedon krater on display may sense its monumental quality; the principal subject of its decoration is undeniably grand, properly epic and truly awesome. Yet the case for regarding it as an eminent and influential achievement within world culture needs to be made and that is the project of this book.

It was the first Greek vase to fetch $1,000,000 on the art market. Such was the value in 1972: it could now be multiplied several times. So the object has acquired an impressive capital worth. Its modern history involves illicit tomb raiding, intrigue, duplicity, litigation, international outrage and possibly homicide. Chapter 2 attempts to clarify the sequence of events, although some details of the heist (including the possible instance of homicide) seem destined for obscurity.

Plates 13 Views of the Sarpedon krater, signed by Euphronios as painter and by Euxitheos as potter, c .515510 BC . H 45.7 cm (18 in); diameter of mouth 55.15 cm (21.7 in). Cerveteri, Museo Archeologico.

SAEM (Soprintendenza archeologica per lEtruria meridionale).

The vase is signed by Euxitheos, the potter who shaped it, and by Euphronios, who painted it. As an example of ceramic construction, it is ambitious and well executed. Perhaps only those viewers who have themselves attempted to throw wet clay into a symmetrical, well-defined shape will really appreciate the level of skill displayed by the potter; in any case, it is the name of the painter that creates the modern price-tag. Before the krater was found, Euphronios was already celebrated in academic and connoisseur circles as one of a group of artists in ancient Athens dubbed the Pioneers. How far these artists were aware of being avant-garde at the time is debatable. But there was some camaraderie around Euphronios, which helps to define his own style and that is the focus of Chapter 3.

Small is beautiful: beyond that adage, the very mobility of this object through space and time is part of its landmark status and key to its metaphorical power. Created in Athens towards the end of the sixth century BC , the krater may have been used for a drinking-party (symposium) in that city: it was probably produced for that purpose the word kratr literally translates as mixer, i.e. a vessel primarily intended for the blending of wine with water at a formal occasion. This formal occasion, the symposium, is the focus of Chapter 4.

Participants at a symposium were bound by a certain shared culture, tantamount to peer pressure. Wherever the vase was used for its intended function, it challenged viewers to recognize a narrative source for at least part of its decoration. We presume this to have been the epic poetry of Homer though it may not have been Homers Iliad exactly as that text has come down to us. The question of why an epic scene was appropriate for a drinking-party is addressed in Chapter 5 and in particular, why the scene features the bloodied body of Sarpedon, a foreign fighter at Troy. (It is in this chapter that readers will find a detailed analysis of the krater.)

At some point the krater made its first long journey, across the Mediterranean from Athens to Etruria (Italy). There are so many vases painted by Euphronios that come from Etruria and in particular, the Etruscan site of Cerveteri (ancient Caere), half an hours drive up the coast from Rome that a direct export is not inconceivable. In any case, some Etruscan owner of the vase used it, perhaps as it was intended to be used as a mixing-bowl. The krater got broken, and was neatly repaired with metal rivets: presumably treasured nonetheless, it was eventually deposited in a tomb in one of the cemeteries of Cerveteri. It is unclear when this happened, but certainly it was before the mid-fourth century BC by which time the status of heirloom may have been acquired.

How a vase intended for a symposium then became suitable as an item of Etruscan mortuary ritual is the topic of Chapter 6. The same chapter also takes note of how the motif of personified Sleep and Death lifting up a body apparently invented by Euphronios, since we have no earlier instance of it went into service for funerals at Athens, too: becoming a decorative theme on the ceramic oil-flasks ( lekythoi ) that Athenians offered to their dead.

Chapter 7 traces the wider diffusion of that motif. Classical, Hellenistic, Roman the standard divisions of style in the Greek and Roman world imply chronological sequence, but also geographical extension. It is in this way that the motif takes wings. The krater itself is underground. But we find testimonies to its remote ingenuity in various media, and in places wherever Greek or Greek-trained artists and craftsmen travelled.

That process for which terms such as diffusion, allusion, recycling and reworking may often overlap is here characterized as the kraters afterlife. This in turn borrows the terminology and method associated with Aby Warburg (18661929), for whom the study of antiquitys afterlife ( das Nachleben der Antike ) began as a personal project and developed into an academic institution. Warburgs method is that embraced by Chapter 8, where we find the Sarpedon motif borrowed and reborn in Christian imagery of the Renaissance. The chapter concludes with a brief attempt to comprehend the enduring aesthetic appeal of the motif beyond the rather drastic psychological explanation that a bit of us rejoices at the sight of a dead fellow human.