South Italian Pottery from the Collection of the Odessa Museum of Western and Eastern Art

The most valuable part of the ancient collection of the Odessa Museum of Western and Eastern Art (hereinafter – WE Art Museum) is its South Italian red-figure vases¹. For many years they were kept in museum storage. A brief catalogue of the museum’s ancient ceramics and glass (for internal use) was compiled in 2000 by the former director of the museum, Viktor Nikiforov,² but a comprehensive scientific description and study of these objects only began in 2012 after the Department of Classical Antiquity resumed its work. The vases were exhibited for the first time in 2017, with some of them having didactic labels that still required significant research and revision. The result is a new catalogue currently being prepared for publication, Catalogue of the Ancient Pottery in the Western Art Museum, which will include figured vases from Apulia, Campania, Lucania, Paestum, and Etruria among other items. The new catalogue is the result of careful research based on the work of recognized authorities in the field of red-figure pottery, in particular, John D. Beazley and A. D. Trendall, materials from the international series Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, monographic studies, directories and catalogues of collections, and other scholarship.

The findspots of the vases included in this catalogue are unknown. Their attribution was carried out primarily on the basis of formal-stylistic and iconographic analysis, including the study of both the shape and decoration of the vase. A number of painted vases were also inspected and photographed in infrared and ultraviolet lights. However, the museum currently lacks specialists capable of conducting a scientific and technical analysis of the pottery, and the attributions have been based on the visual-analytical research.

Not only plots and compositional techniques were considered, but special attention was paid to the image details, the nature of the drawing, – everything that expresses the individual style and is an unconscious manifestation of the creative individuality of the vase painter. Such an approach is necessary when the identity of the author is unknown, as ‘anonymous does not mean unknown’, – according to the British classical archaeologist and art historian John D. Beazley.³ Based on the art-historical method initiated by Giovanni Morelli to attribute the specific ‘hands’ of Renaissance artists, by 1910-1911 Beazley developed his own method of comparative stylistic analysis for the attribution and systematization of Attic red-figure pottery. Later this method was applied to attribute pottery of other fabrics.  New Zealand archaeologist Arthur Dale Trendall, who studied with Beazley, adopted the technique for the attribution of South Italian vases, identifying individual vase painters and assigning them conventional names that reflect either the theme of their painting or the place of discovery or current whereabouts of a particular vase.⁴

Using Trendall’s work, the author of this paper was able to attribute a number of red-figure South Italian vases from the WE Art Museum’s collection to specific painters and workshops. For example, the red-figure nestoris AИ-59 (Fig. 1-2) was attributed to the Roccanova Painter, one of the representatives of Late Lucanian vase-painting, based on a number of characteristic motifs and floral ornament.  The painter gets his name from the Lucanian site of Roccanova, where a large number of their vases were found.⁵ The nestoris belongs to type II: оn a high stem, with a rounded lower part of the body, a wide, concave neck, and two pairs of handles – one pair high and vertical with two pairs of disks, and another small horizontal loops.⁶ Black glaze, semi-matte, and individual lines of the figures are made with brownish slip. The clay is light, with a reddish pigment. The vase was broken and repaired; inside the body there is a layer of restoration in gray, gypsum-like fabric.

On the neck is a black palmette pattern on the reserved background; below, a tongue ornament. On the obverse is depicted a running woman with an open casket in her left hand, followed by a youth. The speed of the woman’s movement is conveyed by diagonal folds going down from the right hip. On the left forearm of the youth is a drapery; in his right hand he holds a broad ribbon folded in half, with tassels falling down. On the reverse, two women in belted chitons with an overfall stand facing each other. Their postures and gestures are mirrored with respect to the central axis, except that the woman to the left is holding a mirror in her right hand. Below and behind this woman is a large closed box, while between the women is a floral scroll. At the top are a window, a rounded object with a circle and a dot of black glaze in the center,  and flanking images of a half-shields (or tympana). Beneath the handles are palmettes with tendrils, cone-shaped and rhomboid flowers. At the bottom, the image is bordered by a reserved band with an uneven wavy line. The disks on the vertical handles are painted with rosettes.

The painting’s late Lucanian style is readily recognizable – somewhat severe and restrained, characterized by a certain stiffness of drawing and largeness of scale and little added color. The figures have their own distinctive features: unusually heavy heads with great, staring eyes and characteristic drawing of lineaments. The hair is made with black glaze, shown as a solid mass, without detail. The chitons of women are decorated with patterns of small dots. A favorite device is that of a half-shield seen in the upper part of the scene.  All these elements are found in the museum nestoris АИ-59.⁷

Whereas the earliest South Italian red-figure pottery was based on Attic models, the nestoris is an indigenous shape. It probably developed from a local form in one of the regions of Southern Italy, such as Messapia, where vases called ‘trozzella’ were painted in the local matt-painted tradition and had tall vertical handles with clay disks often attached to them. The explanation for the term ‘nestoris’ should be sought in 19th-century scholars’ attempt to identify the vessel type with the Homeric Cup of Nestor. The shape initially seems to have been very closely related to the olla, but develops independently from the 7th century BCE.  Nestorides were intended for the ritual consumption of wine in Italian communities and probably marked the achievement of a fundamental passage in the life of the individual that made him or her a full member of the community. It is present in both male and female graves.⁸

The rather provincial style of painting this vase belongs to the last phase of the Lucanian school. It is known that around 370 BCE the vase-painting workshops of the heyday in Heraclea and Metaponto closed and production was moved to sites in the Lucanian hinterland. Off from the main stream of artistic development, the local style soon developed into a provincial one, characterized by a decline in the quality of drawing and in the complexity of iconographic themes. The color of the clay also changed: if the early Lucanian products are characterized by a rich orange-red color of the clay, then with the move to more remote parts of Lucania, the color of the clay becomes lighter. The Roccanova Painter applied a deep pink wash (miltos) to heighten the light color of the clay.⁹

The composition also has a number of specific elements that allow it to be attributed to the Roccanova Painter, including the typical repertoire of ‘frozen’ figures of youth with drapery covering one arm below the elbow, and women in a typical sleeveless dress tightened by a belt with pearls at the ends¹⁰. Examples of similar figures can be seen on the pseudo-Panathenaic amphorae in Turin, Museo di Antichità 4676¹¹ and in Okayama, R.O. Collection,¹² on the lebes gamikos in the British Museum, 1840,1021,1,¹³ and on the squat lekythos in Kyoto, Hashimoto Collection 21.¹⁴ The typical male figures of the Roccanova Painter are also characterized by an exaggerated twist of the free leg,¹⁵ which is particularly clear on the bell krater in Reading, REDMG:1951.160.1¹⁶ and on the volute-krater in Prague, NM-H10 4759.

Whereas the Roccanova Painter depicts the figures on the vase as a standard formula, the painter’s use of floral decor is very peculiar.¹⁷ Just like the nestoris from WE Art Museum, many of his vases are decorated with the cone-shaped and rhomboid flowers that frame the pictures on each side of the vase. As an example, one can cite the floral decoration on the lebes gamikos in the British Museum, 1840,1021.1¹⁸ and on the pseudo-Panathenaic amphorae in Turin, Museo di Antichità 4676.¹⁹ A motif with spiral tendrils and teardrop-shaped leaves often separates the figures. The most specific motif of the Roccanova Painter is the ornament of palmettes painted in black glaze, which can be seen on the neck of the museum nestoris.²⁰ The same palmettes are used to decorate the nestoris Manchester IV E3²¹ and a nestoris in Taranto, Museo Archeologico Nazionale 3603,²² which, in terms of size, proportion, and decorative elements, is the closest comparison for our nestoris. In conclusion, the comparative stylistic analysis of the painting and the characteristic details peculiar to this master allow the attribution of the nestoris АИ-59 to the Roccanova Painter, practically the last famous artist of Lucanian vase-painting working in the period ca. 360 – 330 BCE.

The nestoris entered the WE Art Museum’s collection from Hermitage Museum in 1949. Previously it had been in the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Leningrad until 1930, an organization created in 1820 by a group of influential patrons to promote the development of fine arts, the diffusion of artistic knowledge, the education of painters and sculptors, etc. Research on the provenance of the museum’s ancient vases started in 2013. The vessels had come to WE Art Museum from two sources. A number of them were purchased by the museum in 1950 from a private person – the widow of the famous Odessa artist and collector Yevgeny Bukovetsky. The remainder were South Italian vases transferred permanently from the Hermitage Museum in 1949. Unfortunately, a number of these latter artifacts received significant damage in transit as documented in Act No. 64 of April 2, 1949 «about opening arrived boxes».  Two large South Italian vases were most severely damaged, one of them the nestoris АИ-59. It was broken into 5 fragments, which were then neatly glued together.²³ Also in the Acts of transfer and acceptance is a note referring to the krater AИ-58, broken into 51 fragments. At present, the nestoris and the krater are accurately and, as far as possible, carefully restored, but it is unknown when, where and by whom the restoration was carried out.

Thanks to the cooperation and active support provided by a colleague from the Department of Classical Antiquity of the Hermitage Museum, postdoctoral researcher A.E. Petrakova, we became aware of the sources of the former Hermitage vases transferred in 1949 to the WE Art Museum. For the most part, they come from large pre-revolutionary collections and are associated with the names of famous collectors; a number of vessels had been purchased by the Hermitage from private individuals.

Of particular interest is the red-figure fragmentary hydria AИ-61 depicting a maenad and a satyr (Fig. 3), which derives from an early collection of the 1740s-1750s formed by the famous Neapolitan collector Felice Maria Mastrilli.²⁴ It presents a very rare surviving example of retouching undertaken in the first half of the eighteenth century.  Its ownership history, confirmed by documents (Fig. 4), letters and catalogues, makes this hydria a unique object.²⁵ Attempts have been made to trace the history of other vases prior to being in the Hermitage Museum, but these have been stopped due to the impossibility of any contact between our countries.

Further research of the ancient ceramics’ provenance continues. The Campanian bail amphora (AИ-62) purchased by the Hermitage in 1898 from the well-known antiquities dealer from Odessa Gokhman, provides a particularly interesting history. The antiquary, focusing on the demand that existed among lovers of antiquities of that time, sold it as found in Olbia (as documented by a tag attached to the vase). Stylistic analysis speaks in favour of its Campanian origin.²⁶ At that time, strict control reduced predatory excavations in the Greek colonies of the North Pontic region.  In Southern Italy, on the contrary, the archaeological market was overcrowded, and some merchants carried South Italian figured vases to places of greatest demand, in particular to Odessa, and successfully sold them under the guise of Olbian artifacts.²⁷ Documentary evidence of the purchase of this amphora by Gokhman from an unknown merchant will most likely never be found, but the fact of its return to Odessa  fifty years later is remarkable in itself.

This review paper reflects only a part of the red-figure vases from the WE Art Museum’s collection, which will be introduced into scientific circulation for the first time in the forthcoming Catalogue. The author hopes that this paper will be the first in a series of materials on ancient ceramics from the collection of the Odessa Museum of Western and Eastern Art.

 

 

1. Acknowledgements: I would like to express my gratitude to Martine Denoyelle, Chief heritage curator, Project Manager at the National Institute of Art History (Paris), for the advice, support and help in preparing the publication of the paper; and to Francesca Silvestrelli, Researcher at the University of Salento (Lecce) and co-editor of CIAO.  A special thank to Mark Stansbury-O’Donnell, Professor of Archaeology and Art History, University of Saint Thomas, who has corrected and improved my English version of the text with great patience. I am also grateful to Irina Glebova, Deputy Director for Research at the Odessa Museum of Western and Eastern Art (Odessa, Ukraine) for her support and methodical recommendations. [↩]
2. Античная керамика и римское стекло в собрании Одесского музея западного и восточного искусства: Каталог [Ancient Ceramics and Roman Glass in the Collection of the Odessa Museum of Western and Eastern Art: Catalogue], compiled by V.S. Nikoforov. Odessa, 2000. [↩]
3. «Sir John Beazley». University of Oxford. 12 June 2012 [URL:https://www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/carc/resources/Introduction-to-Greek-Pottery/Techniques-and-styles/Sir-John-Beazley] [↩]
4. A. Cambitoglou, Studies in Honour of Arthur Dale Trendall, Sydney, 1979. [↩]
5. A. Cambitoglou,  Lucani, Vasi, in Enciclopedia dell’ Arte Antica, Vol. IV, 1995,  p. 701. [↩]
6. A.D. Trendall, The red-figured Vases of Lucania, Campania, and Sicily: Second Supplement, London, 1973 [Herafter abbreviated as LCS]. [↩]
7. About Lucanian vase-painting see: A.D. Trendall, Red-figure Vases of South Italy and Sicily (London, 1989); H.B. Walters, History of Ancient Pottery, Vol. 1, Greek, Etruscan, and Roman (London, 1905) 480-481; E.M.W. Tillyard, The Hope Vases: a Catalogue, and a Discussion of the Hope Collection of Greek Vases, with an introduction on the history of the collection, and on Late Attic and South Italian vases, (Cambridge, 1923) 14-15. [↩]
8. For discussion of the origin of the shape, see D. Yntema, “Messapian Painted Pottery: Analysis and Provisory Classification,” BaBesch, Scripta minora, 4 (1974) 7; G. Schneider-Herrmann, Red-figured Lucanian and Apulian Nestorides and their Ancestors, Allard Pierson Series, vol. 1 (Amsterdam, 1980) 19−22; F. Colivicchi, “L’altro vino. Vino, cultura e identità nella Puglia e Basilicata anelleniche,” in Siris. Studi e ricerche della Scuola di Specializzazione in Archeologia di Matera 5 (2004) 25−28. [↩]
9. K. Heuer, The Five Wares of South Italian Vase Painting // Heilbrunn timeline of art history, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2010. [↩]
10. LCS, Suppl. II, abb. 17-21; A.D. Trendall, Handbook to the Nicholson Museum (Sydney, 1948) 329; A. Cambitoglou, “Lucani, vasi” in Enciclopedia dell’arte antica classica e orientale, Secondo supplement, Vol. 4 (Rome, 1995) 701. [↩]
11. CVA, Turin 1, pl. 7, 4-5. [↩]
12. CVA, Japanische Sammlungen 1, 29-30, pl. 24, 1-8. [↩]
13. LCS, p.140, n° 780 [↩]
14. CVA, Japanische Sammlungen 1, 13-14, pl. 12, 1-4. [↩]
15. Tillyard, The Hope Vase, p. 15 [↩]
16. LCS 132, n° 670. [↩]
17. The theme is mentioned in the publication of O. Kifishina, “Растительные мотивы в южно-италийской вазописи. Проблемы изучения [Floral Motifs in South Italian Vase Painting: Problems of Studying], inАктуальные проблемы теории и истории искусства [Actual problems of the theory and history of art] 6 (St Petersburg, 2016) 52-62. [↩]
18. LCS 140, n° 780. [↩]
19. CVA, Turin 1, pl. 7, 4-5 [↩]
20. See Cambitoglou, “Lucani, vasi,” 701 [↩]
21. LCS 138, n° 766. [↩]
22. CVA, Taranto 1, pl. 8.1-3. [↩]
23. The following note was made in the Act: “верхняя часть разбита (горло, ручка – имеются 5 кусков) [“the upper part is broken (throat neck, handle – there are 5 pieces)”] [↩]
24. About the collection of Felice Maria Mastrilli see K. L. Lyons, “The Museo Mastrilli and the Culture of Collecting in Naples, 1700-1755,” Journal of the History of Collections 4.1 (1992) 1-26; M. E. Masci, “The Birth of ancient Vase Collecting in Naples in the Early Eighteenth Century: Antiquarian Studies, Excavations, and Collections,” Journal of the History of Collections 19.11 (2007) 215–224. [↩]
25. Petrakova A.E., “Пелика из коллекции Ф. Мастрилли в собрании ГМЗ «Павловск» [A Pelike from the Collection of F. Mastrilli in the Collection of Pavlovsk State Museum Reserve],” in Атрибуция, история и судьба предметов из императорских коллекций: сб. материалов науч. конф. ГМЗ «Павловск» (Кучумовские чтения) [Attribution, History and Fate of Objects from the Imperial Collections: Anthology of Material from a Scholarly Conference at Pavlovsk State Museum Reserve (Kuchumov Readings)] (St Petersburg, 2014) 228–245. [↩]
26. T. Bykadorova, “Кампанская краснофигурная одноручная амфора из коллекции Одесского музея западного и восточного искусства [Campanian red-figure bail amphora from the collection of the Odessa Museum of Western and Eastern Art],” in Лига Культуры [League of Culture] № 19 (2021) 112-113. [↩]
27. On how interest in antiquities in the late 19th – early 20th century led to dubious methods of supplying private collections, particularly in Odessa, see D. Vasko, “Одесский собиратель Е.А. Шуманский и его коллекция древностей [An Odessa Collector Eugene A. Shumansky and His Collection of Antiquities],” in Клио. Журнал для учёных [Clio. Journal for scientists], № 11(107) (2015) 118-130. [↩]

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