The Sarpedon Krater

THE SARPEDON KRATER

Nigel Spivey

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About The Sarpedon Krater

Once the pride of New York’s 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.

Contents

Welcome Page

About The Sarpedon Krater

Frontispiece

1    Preface

2    ‘The Million-Dollar Vase’

3    Euphronios and ‘the Pioneers’

4    Athens and the Symposium

5    Epic as Education

6    An Image for the Afterlife

7    The Afterlife of an Image (I)

8    The Afterlife of an Image (II)

9    Coda

Appendices

References

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About Nigel Spivey

Also by Nigel Spivey

The Landmark Library

An Invitation from the Publisher

Copyright

Frontispiece

1

Preface

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 1–3). 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 1–3 Views of the Sarpedon krater, signed by Euphronios as painter and by Euxitheos as potter, c.515–510 BC. H 45.7 cm (18 in); diameter of mouth 55.15 cm (21.7 in). Cerveteri, Museo Archeologico.

SAEM (Soprintendenza archeologica per l’Etruria 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 kratêr 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 Homer’s 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 hour’s 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 krater’s ‘afterlife’. This in turn borrows the terminology and method associated with Aby Warburg (1866–1929), for whom the study of ‘antiquity’s afterlife’ (das Nachleben der Antike) began as a personal project and developed into an academic institution. Warburg’s 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.

Our journey ends, with Chapter 9, at Xanthos in Lycia: historically the final resting-place of Sarpedon, the hero who inspired this heroic work of art.

2

‘The Million-Dollar Vase’

The Finding of the Krater – and the Battle for its Custody

‘The finest Greek vase there is.’ The pride with which a new acquisition was announced in the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin for autumn 1972 was, in retrospect, asking for trouble. Its sentiment might not be controversial: this book essentially supports the superlative claim. But proclaiming the splendour of the result deepened the shadows cast by the means of its achievement. The tale of how our vase was acquired by the New York museum, and why it was then ‘repatriated’ to Italy, is notorious. Some details remain irredeemably obscure. Nonetheless it seems worth making a synthesis – as follows.

The story could begin with a minor episode. A twelve-year-old boy is taken for his first visit to the grand archaeological museums in Berlin. It is 1930: Wall Street has hardly recovered from the ‘Great Crash’ of its stock market, while in Germany, National Socialism is becoming a significant political movement. But this young visitor from Thuringia is transfixed by the sight of a single Greek vase in one of the cabinets of the Antikensammlung. It is a large krater, decorated with scenes from an Athenian gymnasium: athletes caught in various poses, along with their trainer and junior attendants (Fig. 1). The vase is not signed, yet the museum label refers to an artist by name: ‘Euphronios’. The boy resolves there and then that he will become an archaeologist, and devote his life to studying such fascinating objects as this.

Fig. 1 Calyx-krater attributed to Euphronios, reportedly found near Capua in the 1870s. An early work, c.520 BC. See also Fig. 18. H 34.8 cm (13.7 in). Berlin, Antikensammlung F 2180.

Ingrid Geske.

This is how Dietrich von Bothmer, long-serving curator of antiquities at the New York Metropolitan Museum, recounted the moment that shaped his career as an expert in Greek painted pottery. Se non é vero é ben trovato, as Italians would say – ‘if not true, then it ought to be’; or else, suppose the child to be the father of the man, and so the boy first enchanted upon seeing a splendid vase by Euphronios becomes the careful scholar who forsook professional caution in order to acquire a similar vase by the same painter – similar in shape, that is, yet even more outstanding in decoration. Either way, it is a sort of love affair – and goes some way to explaining the modern drama of the Sarpedon krater. Of the various protagonists in this drama, none was more passionately motivated than Dietrich von Bothmer.

His youthful ambition, along with his opposition to Nazism, took him first to Britain, then the United States. Awarded a Rhodes Scholarship in 1938 (when Germans were still eligible for that award), Bothmer became a student of J. D. Beazley, then Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology at Oxford. So he apprenticed himself to the world’s acknowledged supreme expert on ancient Greek vase-painting – and developed, by his own admission, into a devoted disciple. Not only did he learn Beazley’s methods for attributing even anonymous paintings to specific ‘hands’, and gain a mastery of these methods that would enable him, before long, to become the expert’s most trusted collaborator, but he also showed a particular flair for reuniting ‘orphans’ with their ‘family’ – that is, seeing how fragments of a single vase, even when scattered across different continents, could be pieced together. The interruption of war brought emigration to America, where Bothmer continued his studies first at Berkeley (under H. R. W. Smith, also a former Beazley student), and subsequently at Chicago, before volunteering for military service in the Pacific. Demobbed (with distinction), he resumed the vocation of scholar and connoisseur. Though an ocean lay between them, he maintained a steady correspondence with Beazley in Oxford, exchanging notes, sketches and photographs, and it became their custom to arrange an annual meeting.

Among Beazley’s early works is a monograph entitled Attic Red-Figured Vases in American Museums (1918). This carried a dedication to Edward Warren and John Marshall, saluting ‘their unwearied labour in building up the magnificent collection of vases in America’. Warren, the son of a paper-mill magnate, began using his inheritance to buy classical antiquities while still a student, visiting Rome. Marshall, his companion, would be hired by the New York Metropolitan Museum as its ‘European agent’ for the acquisition of classical antiquities. Marshall undertook that office in 1906, at a time when the Metropolitan Museum possessed very few Greek vases. By the time of his death, in 1928, Marshall had achieved remarkable results. Curator Gisela Richter – who appointed Bothmer as assistant curator at the Met in 1946 – could declare that, over two decades, ‘a collection was formed which is not only representative of the chief periods of Athenian red-figure but which ranks as one of the finest in the world’.

If only it could include Euphronios. The fact remained that American museums possessed very little of the painter’s work. Frank Tarbell, director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens 1888–9, had acquired some sherds, which eventually passed to the University of Chicago. In 1910, the Museum of Fine Arts at Boston had purchased a number of antiquities from Edward Warren, including several pieces of a psykter (wine-cooler: see p. 87) that Beazley attributed to Euphronios. Said to have come from the Etruscan site of Orvieto, this vase, even in its fragmentary state, showed an artistic ambition to orchestrate emotive scenes within the limited space of a curved vessel (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2 Detail of a psykter attributed to Euphronios. The deranged King Pentheus, already bleeding profusely, is gripped on each side by two maenads (one named, perhaps ironically, Galene, ‘Calm’); other maenads are rushing around the vase. H 12.8 cm (5 in). Boston, Museum of Fine Arts 10.221a–f.

Fig. 3 Fragmentary calyx-krater attributed to Euphronios, with scenes of a symposium. The piping figure is labelled Syko (‘Fig’); the reclining drinker with frontal face, Thoudemos; the handsome youth gesticulating from his couch, ‘Smikros’ (‘Tiny’). (The hair and facial features of this figure closely match those of Sarpedon – see Fig. 78). H 44.5 cm (17.5 in). Munich, Antikensammlungen 8935.

Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek München/Renate Kühling.

Opportunities to acquire works of such archaic interest and quality seemed unlikely to multiply. Then, in the early 1960s, a partial calyx-krater attributed to Euphronios, showing scenes of a drinking-party or symposion, was brought to academic attention by the Boston-based classical archaeologist Emily Vermeule (Fig. 3). Noting gratefully that the fragmentary vessel had been loaned first for an exhibition at Providence, Rhode Island, and subsequently to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Vermeule remained discreet concerning the owner’s identity. As for the likely provenance of the vase, she made no direct comment, merely observing – from signs of wear on the rim, and an ancient repair to its surviving handle – that ‘the krater probably enjoyed constant use as a show piece at Etruscan banquets before being consigned to the tomb’. The vase eventually passed into the holdings of Munich’s Staatliche Antikensammlungen in 1969 – by which time it had been ‘certificated’, as it were, within the oeuvre of Euphronios. Sir John Beazley (knighted in 1949, and subsequently made a Companion of Honour in 1959, for his services to scholarship) had already included it as an addendum to the second edition of his Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters (1963). In the laconic style he used for these compendious catalogues, Beazley simply gave the provenance of the krater as ‘Philadelphia market’, and added: ‘Attributed by Hecht’.

In his preface to the same book, Beazley acknowledged the assistance he had received from two individuals – for their ‘kind acts’, ‘and for bringing to my notice vases that would otherwise have escaped me’. One was Herbert Cahn, proprietor of a family firm in Basel dealing in ancient coins and artefacts. The other was Robert (‘Bob’) Hecht. Like Cahn, Hecht had studied classical archaeology seriously before taking up trade in antiquities during the 1950s. A former Fellow of the American Academy at Rome, he became domiciled in that city, and used it as a base for business with museums and collectors around the world. Though remembered as a ‘suave’ and ‘worldly’ operator, Hecht could also be indiscreet: in 1962, for example, his excitement about some coins he had acquired in Turkey led him to examine them on an internal flight: witnessed doing so, and challenged by police at Istanbul airport with attempting illegal export, he was