No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
A Mycenaean Chalice and a Vase Painter
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 October 2013
Extract
The vase which is discussed below was brought to the British Museum for identification by the late Mrs. Maitland Sikes in 1951, together with other vases of Cypriote manufacture, and eventually it has been placed on loan in the Museum. Its provenance is unknown, but its Cypriote companions and the nature of its form and decoration, as it will be discussed below, speak in favour of Cyprus.
(Plate 8a.) Fabric: buff-pinkish clay, good quality ‘Mycenaean’. Surface covered with a smooth buff-pinkish slip; decoration in brown to dark brown lustrous paint.
Shape: deep bowl, slightly concave sides, carinated profile; long cylindrical stem, disk-shaped foot with deep depression at bottom. Almost half of the cup and part of the foot are missing and have been restored in plaster.
Diam.: 10·2 cm.; height: 24·5 cm.
The inside of the cup is left blank except for a painted horizontal band just below the rim. The outside surface is decorated with horizontal bands encircling the cup, stem, and foot; thin horizontal lines encircle the lower half of the cup. The upper half is decorated with a frieze of identically repeated bull protomes, looking right. Three protomes survive and the horns of a fourth, but originally there must have been six. The space between them is filled with dotted circles.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Council, British School at Athens 1957
References
1 The writer's thanks are due to Mr. R. S. Sikes, who generously allowed publication of this vase which is now his property, to Messrs. D. Haynes and R. Higgins of the British Museum for their kind co-operation and assistance, and to the Trustees of the British Museum for the photographs (Plate 8). The vase is now exhibited in the British Museum, King Edward VII Gallery, together with other Mycenaean vases from the Aegean and the Levant.
2 The only reference so far to this vase has been made by Stubbings, F. in a footnote of his book Mycenaean Pottery from the Levant (1951) 87Google Scholar, n. 2.
3 Schaeffer, C. F. A., Ugaritica ii (1949)Google Scholar, fig. 127, 14, 15, 17, 18; Stubbings, op. cit. pl. xvi. 12.
4 Hamilton, R. W., QDAP iv (1935) 45, 280, pls. xvii. 280, and xxii. o, pGoogle Scholar; Stubbings, op. cit. pl. xvi. 8.
5 Stubbings, op. cit. 87.
6 For other specifically Levanto-Mycenaean forms see Stubbings, op. cit. 38 ff., fig. 8; Sjöqvist, E., Problems of the Late Cypriote Bronze Age (1940) 66 ff.Google Scholar; Furumark, A., The Mycenaean Pottery, Analysis and Classification (1941) 66Google Scholar (here after MP).
7 Cf. Furumark, MP, figs. 16–18.
8 Furumark, loc. cit. types 261, 267.
9 Karo, G., Die Schachtgräber von Mykenae (1930)Google Scholar, pl. cix, no. 412.
10 Persson, A., New Tombs at Dendra near Midea (1942)Google Scholar, fig. 117.
11 It is obvious why bronze vessels have survived only in very small numbers from antiquity. It is very characteristic that from the bronze vessels of the Late Bronze Age in Cyprus, which have so much influenced local Cypriote forms, only scanty remains have survived.
12 Op. cit. 64, n. 2.
13 Op. cit. 436, n. 3.
14 Op. cit. 435, fig. 75.
15 Op. cit. 436.
16 A brief reconsideration of these forms here may not be wholly out of place. For his vase no. 1 cf. a fine Cretan jug recently discovered at Katsamba, near Knossos (Alexiou, St., Κρητικὰ Χρονικά vi (1952)Google Scholar, pl. A). There is another fragment from the same crater now in the Cyprus Museum with a representation of the upper part of the same vase, which helps to reconstruct the whole form: it is in fact identical with the jug from Katsamba. For other similar forms from the Aegean, cf. Evans, , Palace of Minos ii. 653Google Scholar; iv. 452 ff. (hereafter PM).
For his no. 2 cf. the conical rhyton which is common in the Mycenaean repertory (Furumark, MP, fig. 20, type 199).
For his no. 3 cf. Mycenaean bowls with a high vertical loop handle (ibid, type 253).
His no. 5 may well correspond to the Mycenaean open crater with vertical strap handles. The pointed base may be due to the inaccuracy of the drawing of the forms.
17 There is a certain similarity between the Mycenaean chalice form and the ‘fruit-stands’ from Beycesultan, Turkey (Lloyd, Seton and Mellaart, James, Anatolian Studies v (1955) 55Google Scholar, fig. 6, pls. iiib–iva), but it would be unnatural to suppose that the one influenced the other (op. cit. 54).
18 Evans, A., PM iv. 2, 390 ff., figs. 325–9.Google Scholar
19 Stubbings, op. cit. 39, fig. 8k; see also discussion on a similar jug from the Pierides, G. G. Collection, Karageorghis, V., Syria xxxiv (1957) 82 ff.Google Scholar
20 CVA Gr. Brit. pl. 17, 13; Stubbings, op. cit. pl. xii. 2.
21 Schaeffer, op. cit. pl. xxix, bottom left; Stubbings, op. cit. pl. xvi. 1.
22 Furumark, op. cit. 248, fig. 28.
23 Immerwahr, S. A., AJA lx (1956) 138.Google Scholar
24 Immerwahr, S. A., AJA lx (1956) pl. 53, figs. 6–7.Google Scholar
25 Ibid. pl. 53, fig. 8.
26 Ibid. pl. 53, figs. 6–7.
27 Ibid. pl. 54, figs. 10–12.
28 Stubbings, op. cit. 8d.
29 Cf. ibid. pls. xii. 1–12, xvi. 1–6; CVA Gr. Brit. pl. 16, 19–23, 25, 26. Occasionally, however, the rotating arrangement of motives was replaced by a radiating arrangement, but in both cases the conception of the circle was maintained, cf. Stubbings, op. cit. pls. xii. 7, 11, xvi. 2, 4.
30 Ibid. pl. xii. 1–2, xvi. 1, 3; CVA Gr. Brit. pl. 16, 22; Karageorghis, V., Δελτίον Κυπριακῶν Σπουδῶν 1957, pl. iv, nos. 44, 55Google Scholar; Schaeffer, op. cit. fig. 126, 2; Walters, H. B., Catalogue of the Greek and Etruscan Vases in the British Museum i. 2 (1912) 131Google Scholar, fig. 257.
31 It is important to note that even such simple motives have been simplified and reduced, e.g. Walters, loc. cit.; Schaeffer, loc. cit.
32 Cf. similar embroidery qualities on Pierides bowl 55, Karageorghis, op. cit. pl. iv, no. 55.
33 Cf. views expressed by this writer with regard to recognition of individual vase painters, AJA lx (1956) 147. One could easily compare the methods of a present-day cartoonist with those of a Mycenaean vase painter; they both create their repertory of standard motives and figures, which they can draw without much effort and in a short time. These may be easily attributed to the hand that made them.
34 See Karageorghis, , Δελτίον Κυπριακῶν Σπουδῶν 1956, 5ff.Google Scholar
35 It is interesting to note that the excavator of Tell-Abu-Hawam has given his Mycenaean chalices a date commencing c. 1230 B.C. (R. W. Hamilton, op. cit. 46).
36 It is true that the bull protome is used once as a pictorial motive on a Mycenaean bowl from the Argive Heraeum (Waldstein, , The Argive Heraeum ii (1905) 91, fig. 19)Google Scholar; the style, however, and the figure drawing imitate a Levantine prototype. It is characteristic that even the finder of the fragment mistook the motive for a fish(!) (op. cit. 91).
37 Immerwahr, op. cit. 140; cf. also her n. 24, where doubts are expressed even for the location of the atelier of the Protome Painter.