A New Skyphos by the Pisticci Painter

Abstract

SKYPHOS in the Gustav-Liibcke Museum in Hamm in Westfalia, a work by the Pisticci painter,' can now be added to the list of known skyphoi by that painter. These show a single figure on each side, usually Pan or a silen, and also women, maenads, or youths. The new vase is from the Liibcke collection, and now bears the inventory number 1551 at Hamm.2 On the obverse (pl. vI, B) is the picture of a youth in chiton and himation, leaning on his staff and facing right. His cloak is pulled up high in back of his head, his skull elongated and bald. On the reverse (pl. vii, A) a silen is depicted holding a thyrsus and wrapped in a wide robe made of shaggy woolen material. On the grounds of stylistic similarities with a number of vases by the Pisticci painter, our skyphos may be attributed to that master. Characteristic is the painter's choice of subject; on this vase, as on most of his other works, the subjects are not taken from mythology and the composition is not on a large scale. A comparison of the silen with the maenad between two silens on a calyx krater in Bologna3 shows an obvious identity of hands: the poses of both maenad and silen are the same, both are almost completely covered by their robes, with only the heads showing. A certain angularity of profile is also evident in both figures, which is apparent especially in the rendering of elbow and knee. Folds are given in simple straight lines, and in both figures recurs the parallel arrangement of diagonal folds near the neck. The parallel lines below the silen's hip find a correspondence in the vertical strokes along the maenad's side. Similar are also the bold zig-zags of the folds at the borders. The concentric curved lines in the lower portion of the silen's robe are missing, it is true, in the maenad's, but they recur in the woman beside the figure of Eros on a krater in the Vatican.4 The drawing of the silen's bulbous nose, of his mouth and eye, find their best parallels in the drawing of a dancing Pan on a skyphos in Dresden:5 a thick curved line for the eyebrow, a curved stroke for the upper lid, and for the eye proper two strokes and a dot between. The lower stroke of the eye is bent, the dot somewhat elongated and oblique, whereby the face acquires a tense expression, which is a rare feature in the Pisticci painter's work. The baldness at the top of the head, reaching far to the back, the sketchily drawn and ragged beard, the mass of hair only slightly relieved at the edges, all this is in complete agreement with the other representations of this figure, which is a favorite with the painter and his circle. Compare, e.g., the silens dancing around a maenad on another krater in Bologna;6 the one on the left also bears a thyrsus similar to that of the Hamm silen. The feet, a weak point