Red-Figure Calyx Krater

To understand this vessel one must first imagine it full. The calyx krater — so named because its flaring body opens like the calyx of a flower — was the social centre of the Greek symposium, the wine-drinking gathering at which Athenian men reclined to talk, sing, flirt and argue. Into its wide bowl a servant poured wine, then water, mixing the two in a ratio the host decreed; to drink wine unmixed was, the Greeks held, the habit of barbarians. Every cup raised that evening had first passed through this great basin. The krater was therefore never a peripheral object but the literal hub of the room, and its decoration was chosen to be read in the round, by guests circling it through a long night.

Standing some forty-six centimetres tall and nearly fifty across at the rim, the vessel belongs to the most ambitious class of Attic tableware. Its silhouette is severe and architectural: a low cul, a deep cup-shaped body, and two upturned handles set near the base like the arms of a wrestler braced for a lift. The proportions place it firmly in the second quarter of the fifth century BCE, the decade in which the calyx form reached its classic equilibrium.

The red-figure revolution

The painting employs the red-figure technique, the innovation that overturned Athenian ceramic practice around 530 BCE. In the older black-figure manner, figures were painted as black silhouettes on the orange clay and their interior details incised with a needle — a method that gave crisp outlines but stiff, schematic bodies. Red-figure inverted the logic entirely. Now the background was filled with black slip and the figures were reserved in the clay's natural red, their anatomy drawn not by scratching but by brush: a supple relief line for contours and muscle, dilute glaze for softer washes of hair and drapery. The result was a sudden liberation of the human form. Figures could turn, foreshorten, glance over a shoulder; the eye, no longer a frontal almond on a profile face, began to be seen from the side as it truly is.

The black-figure painter incised what he knew; the red-figure painter drew what he saw.

On this krater the technique is handled with assurance. The principal side shows a Dionysiac procession: the god himself, ivy-crowned and bearded, holds a kantharos while a maenad spins beside him, her head thrown back and her thyrsos raised, and a satyr capers at the margin with a wineskin slung across his shoulder. The reverse carries three cloaked youths in quieter conversation — the standard, almost shorthand, secondary scene that workshops painted to fill the back of a vessel meant to stand against a wall. The choice of subject is no accident: Dionysos, god of wine and of transformation, presides over the very ritual the krater served.

Attributing a nameless hand

No Greek vase-painter of this period signed more than a fraction of his output, and most signed nothing at all. Yet scholars routinely speak of individual artists — the Berlin Painter, the Niobid Painter, and here our own Relicva Painter. These names are modern conveniences, assigned through the method of connoisseurship pioneered by Sir John Beazley, who grouped thousands of unsigned vessels by the unconscious habits of drawing that betray a single hand: the precise loop of an ear, the way a knee is articulated, the cursive flourish at the hem of a himation. The Relicva Painter, named by this museum for the vase you see, is known from a small cluster of kraters sharing a distinctive maenad — that backward-flung head, the sharp wing of the brow — and a habit of leaving the relief line slightly raised, so that it catches the light. He worked, on the evidence of his shapes, in the years around 460 BCE.

From Athens to an Etruscan tomb

The vessel was made in the Kerameikos, the potters' quarter of Athens, but it was found far away, in a chamber tomb at Vulci in southern Etruria. This is the rule rather than the exception. The Etruscans were the great export market for Attic pottery, and they buried these vases with their dead as prized possessions; the cemeteries of Vulci, Cerveteri and Tarquinia have yielded the overwhelming majority of intact Greek vases known today. We owe the survival of this krater not to Greece but to Etruria — to a people who valued an Athenian painter's work enough to carry it across the sea and lay it, unbroken, in the earth. For the painters' own intentions, and for the wider grammar of these scenes, see our essay Reading the Vases.