A Newly Acquired Ancient Greek Vase
By Seth Pevnick, Curator of Greek and Roman Art
Each of the many ancient Greek vases on view in the Dr. John and Helen Collis Family Gallery (102B–C) has multiple stories to tell (fig. 1). Their painted figures, whether black or red, human or animal, may show characters from ancient mythology or actions of or events from daily life. Their shapes and decoration can provide clues to practical functions, and the potters and painters who made them may be known — occasionally by name from signatures, but more often named by scholars based on careful study and links to similar vases in other collections. The names of owners of Greek vases can sometimes be determined, too — occasionally ancient owners, if we can trust inscriptions scratched into their surfaces, but more frequently modern owners, if good records exist.
While many vases have been in the collection for decades and their stories told numerous times, we focus here on a new arrival, acquired in March and put on view in May. This commanding vase is a relatively rare shape known as a stamnos, a high-shouldered, wide-mouthed vessel with two horizontal handles at the widest point (fig. 2a–c). Made in or around Athens, ostensibly for mixing and serving wine at Greek symposia (drinking parties), Attic red-figure stamnoi seem to have been more popular in ancient Italy than in Greece. In fact, they were likely made primarily for the export market, sometimes becoming cinerary urns in Etruscan tombs. Unlike kraters, drinking cups, or amphorae, more common shapes with many thousands of extant examples, fewer than 500 red-figure stamnoi survive in modern collections worldwide.
Whether for Greek or Etruscan taste, red-figure stamnoi frequently feature wine-related iconography, including the komos, a post-symposion revel fueled by wine and music. Here, a finely dressed woman plays the pipes at right, leading three nearly nude male figures across the vase (fig. 2a). Just behind her, a young man carries a walking stick and reaches forward, while his bearded companion holds a drinking cup and stretches one hand back, apparently dancing and feeling the effects of his wine. A more composed young man follows, concentrating on the music of his lyre. All four figures stride barefoot across a meander band punctuated with squares.
With slight variations, this band encircles the vase, connecting the front, the back, and the two side panels, which the painter has animated with profuse palmettes and tendrils surrounding the handles (fig. 2b). Three draped young men occupy the reverse, the one at right gesturing back toward the other two (fig. 2c). Above his outstretched arm is a small wine jug, connecting to the livelier komos of the other side.
Similar komos scenes appear on several other stamnoi attributed to the Kleophon Painter. One in the State Hermitage Museum (Saint Petersburg, Russia; BAPD 215147) bears the inscription Kleophon kalos (“Kleophon is beautiful”), lending a name to the otherwise anonymous painter.
Part of a larger group known as the Polygnotans (after its leader, Polygnotos), the Kleophon Painter was one of the most important vase-painters working in Periklean Athens, when the great buildings of the Athenian Acropolis were being built. Notably, their vases often show the influence of the sculptural style of the Parthenon, the famous temple of Athena built between 447 and 432 BCE. This is most apparent in the solemn sacrificial procession on a remarkable volute-krater now in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Ferrara (BAPD 215141).
But the painter created much more lively figures as well, in the lower frieze of the volute-krater and on the stamnoi now in Cleveland, Saint Petersburg, and elsewhere. Despite the very different subject matter, several of the musicians and revelers on the Cleveland stamnos can be favorably compared with figures from the north frieze of the Parthenon, completed under the direction of the sculptor Pheidias. The bearded reveler on the stamnos, for example, strikes a pose quite like that of a nearly nude parade marshal gesturing dramatically behind a chariot on a frieze block in the Acropolis Museum in Athens (fig. 3).
Before this vase was acquired, the CMA collection did not include a single stamnos nor any vases by the Kleophon Painter. Although komos scenes appear on several other CMA vases, all date earlier and none has the elegance of this stamnos, its delicate figures so well harmonized with its shape. So, in numerous ways — date, shape, painter, iconography — the stamnos has added to the CMA collection, transporting visitors across time and space to the world of Classical Athens.
But the vase can tell other stories, too, as a look beneath its foot suggests (fig. 4). Most of the marks seen here seem to match the recorded modern history of the vase (listed under “Provenance” in Collection Online, with corresponding publications in “Citations”).
The largest mark, in thick black paint, could be “080,” the earliest recorded number of the vase, number 80 in a catalogue of Greek vases and other antiquities from the collection of Henri De Morgan offered for sale at the Fifth Avenue Art Galleries in New York City on January 16, 1909. Here the vase is illustrated, described, and said to be from Southern Italy, though with no further information about its discovery or findspot. Thomas Barlow Walker, a Minnesota lumber baron and art collector, purchased the vase in this 1909 sale, and the two marks reading “WF2” must refer to its number in his Walker Foundation. Similarly, the red “09.6” corresponds to an old accession number at the Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis institution Walker founded. The stamnos spent more than a century in Minneapolis, sometimes on display, until 2016. Then, with the Walker’s focus firmly set on modern and contemporary art, it deaccessioned the stamnos and a few other vases.
Now, in 2023, the latest chapter in the long story of this remarkable vase has begun. Safely installed in its new home in Cleveland, surrounded by vases and other artworks made in ancient Greece, this stamnos decorated by the Kleophon Painter nearly 2,500 years ago awaits its newest admirers.
