A Phlyax Vase in Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

In the general tribute to Miss Richter, celebrating, for her jubilee, her doubly immense achievement, of service urbi et orbi and of scholarship, may I offer, for my own token of esteem and gratitude, something from my photographic notes of a South American collection?' The object published (for the first time) on pl. 87, i-6, is perhaps the most interesting of the Greek and Italic antiquities now harbored (after strange vicissitudes for some of them) in the Museu Nacional of Brazil, Rio de Janeiro; it is certainly the most amusing. The tantalized references made to it by Heydemann,2 Wiist,3 and Catteruccia,4 who knew it only from an old description made before it crossed the South Atlantic as gift from a king to an emperor, almost justify saying that of all lost vases this, Rio i5o0, was the most missed. For permission to publish it I must thank Professors of the University of Brazil, Dr. Jose Candido de Melo Carvalho, Director of the Museu Nacional at the time of my visit, and Dr. Luiz de Castro Faria, Chief then of the Anthropological and Ethnological Section and present Director. And I must acknowledge the courtesy of Professor A. D. Trendall in verifying, from photographs, my judgment of the vase's style (see his Phlyax Vases [London i960] p. 32 no. 53); it can stand as confirmed -and only requiring explanation-that at least the reverse of this Campanian bell krater is in the manner of an artist to whom the scholar honored by its publication is almost eponymously related: the Painter of New York G.R. Iooo,5 a member of Beazley's C.A. Group.' May I shorten him to G.R. Painter? That more than one member of the C.A. Group (a firm, as Beazley has seen) had a hand in the decoration of Rio 1500 is not impossible. It is the less interesting features or traits of the vase that place it stylometrically. The proportions and profile are those characteristic for the late Campanian bell krater (a contemporary Paestan one would be less bulbous and stemmy, the foot of an Apulian one would not be concave in outline). The stamp of the C.A. Group is evident at once in the accessory ornament, and especially in the floral work which separates the pictures. This is according to its characteristic system, the elements of which are here shaped and disposed with such particular resemblance to details of the Carditello krater7 in Capua that we might guess them to be finishing touches by the firm's senior partner, the C.A. Painter, to whom Beazley has attributed the Capua krater. It is his taste that seems detectable in the shape (like an ax blade) of the wedged between each pair of volutes, as well as in the form and direction of the half-palmette below them. His juniors, the G.R. and A.P.Z. Painters,8 less resistant to Apulian influence, always snip that flower into a trefoil and sometimes invert the half-