Published Catalogue Text: Stone Sculptures: The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums , written 1990
23
Grave Lekythos
The foot and neck from above the shoulder are missing, as is the corresponding part of the handle.
Shown is a scene of a seated woman, a man standing in front of her, leaning on a staff and extending his hand, and two children behind or around her chair. The smaller child, in front of the woman, is reaching up towrd her, to grasp her left hand. All wear the conventional Attic formal dress of the fourth century B.C. There are many variants of this scene, the woman seated, the man standing, vice versa, both standing, and the children on either side or on one side. A large lekythos in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, has a family and retainers to the number of seven represented on the curved surface. An example from the Ernst Brummer Collection is similar to this in size and style, with the five members of the family all standing (Galerie Koller A.G., 1979, pp. 188-189, no. 604).
A number of Attic marble funerary lekythoi like the Harvard example show similar compositions in mirror reversal, suggesting that the sculptors who carved these standard, low-relief scenes could work from "pattern-books," templates, or even rubbings. A lekythos with reversed scene, dated 375-350 BC is in the collection of Mr. Gilbert Denman, Jr., in San Antonio (Hoffmann, 1970, pp. 24-25, no. 7).
Another such lekythos, of a date closer to 330 or 320 BC, also shows the reversed scene--the child at the right behind the standing young man and a young woman, head bent on upraised left hand, facing to the right in the center rear of the composition (Sotheby Sale, London, 10 December, 1984, Lot no. 288). Clearly the possible combinations were limitless and were simply reduced, low-relief versions of the compositions on the larger, rectangular stelai found in the same Attic cemeteries.
Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer
