Attic Red-Figure Calyx Krater: The Return of Hephaistos to Olympos

Re-View Exhibition, Spring 2008, gallery label information:

The krater, a large vessel for mixing wine with water, was central to the symposion, the Greek all-male drinking party. Consuming undiluted wine was considered uncivilized: the habit of barbarians and of satyrs, the companions of the wine god Dionysos. Representations of satyrs-part human, part animal, and easily aroused-surround this vessel in a continuous procession. The frolicking is occasioned by Hephaistos's return, atop a mule, to Mount Olympos (note the satyr carrying the divine smith's bellows). This story illustrates the compelling power of wine, since it was Dionysos who persuaded the disgruntled Hephaistos to return-by making him drunk. The masterful drawing is from the hand of the Kleophrades Painter, a highly skilled but anonymous vase painter named after the potter whose products he decorated.

Said to come from Tarentum. Jacob Hirsch to Frederick M. Watkins, 1941; Gift to the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, 1960.

In addition, a handwritten note in the 1973 catalogue written by David Mitten quotes a March 5, 1973 letter from Dietrich von Bothmer: "Attributed by Miss Richter in December 1932, when the vase was first offered to us [at the Metropolitan Museum]. The anecdote involving Goering, pp. 7-8 [in the 1973 Watkins Catalogue] is spurious, and, in any event, Goering was neither a field marshal nor at the height of his power when Hirsch offered the vase to us. By the way, it was Hirsch's Italian source, not the vase, that came from Taranto (Francesco Festa)."

[Andreya Mihaloew 4/28/2008]

The Frederick M. Watkins Collection, exh. cat., Fogg Art Museum (Cambridge, MA, 1973), pp. 50-51, no. 20

Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (LIMC), Artemis (Zürich, Switzerland, 1999), pp. 642-643, p. 653 (Vol. IV.1), pp. 1119, 1132 (Vol VIII.1)

Dr. Sheramy D. Bundrick, Music and Image in Classical Athens, Cambridge University Press (U.K.) (New York, NY, 2005), p. 110, fig. 64

Stephan Wolohojian, ed., Harvard Art Museum/Handbook, exh. cat., ed. Stephan Wolohojian (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2008)