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Bronze inlaid with silver, second half of the first century B.C.E.

Condition: Essentially complete and in an exceptional state of preservation; some repairs and interior reinforcement to the body.

H. 58 cm.

This sumptuously ornamented vessel, unique among the ancient vases known to us, is probably best characterized as a lebes (cauldron). Its purpose can only be inferred. The decoration alludes to Dionysos, god of wine and ecstasy. The half-length figure of a young satyr (or Pan), a member of the god's inebriated retinue, adorns the front, and a large grapevine leaf is shown in relief under the back handle. The exuberant vegetation-like forms of the handles and the intricate low-relief composition of blooms and foliage at the front seem to express the inexhaustible generative forces of nature, another Dionysiac theme. The vessel must have been connected with the service of wine, and the very functional hinged design of the lid may imply that it was made for actual use. However, the extraordinary preservation of the piece suggests that it survived in a closed chamber, probably a tomb, either as a container for the ashes of the deceased or as a funerary offering.

While the object as a whole is unprecedented, many of its separate features have revealing parallels elsewhere; Hellenistic elements predominate. The basic shape of the body, a flattened globular form with a short, wide neck and everted lip, is one familiar in decorative or ceremonial vases of late Hellenistic times, as well as in Roman cinerary urns. Monumental vessels of this form, usually with griffin protomes testifying to the shape's ultimate derivation from the great orientalizing cauldrons of Archaic times, figure prominently in the sanctuary scenes of Second- and Third-Style wall painting. in these representations as in our piece the vase has a lid of flattened conical shape with concave sides, culminating in a tall, spindlelike turned finial.

The energized appearance of the vessel owes much to the fact that its body rests not on the usual profiles base but on three rollerlike spool feet. It has been noted (Bernard Holtzmann, verbally to Marion True) that similar feet support the basin with perching doves in the Capitoline mosaic, which is probably a work of the second century B.C.E.

The fluted side handles of the lebes, bursting into leaf at the edges of their central bead, have palmette attachment plates. They belong to a Hellenistic type seen, for example, on a bronze hydria in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (66.11.12); variants, including an example on the New York art market (Fortuna Gallery, 1993), continue into the Roman period.

The magnificent foliate back handle has a close parallel in two bronze attachments from the Mahdia wreck (an ancient ship, laden with works of art, that sank off Tunis at the end of the second century B.C.E.). They appear to have a slightly different curvature but are strikingly similar to the lebes handle in style and basic composition. On the lebes, the toothed acanthus of the handle proper continues beyond the hinge, breaking like a wave onto the lid, where the foliage is modeled in low relief and has frothing, ruffled edges like the acanthus on Italo-Hellenistic capitals.

Hellenistic rococo inspiration is obvious in the bust of a satyr decorating the front of the vase. The handsome, high-cheekboned young rustic snaps his fingers an bares his teeth in a wild, impudent grin; his eyes and teeth are silvered. His facial features and his gesture recall the Kroupezion Satyr and the Young Centaur, large-scale Hellenistic works usually dated in the second half of the second century B.C.E. The finely modeled bust seems to reproduce a prototype of this time with almost academic precision. One detail, the wart near the right nostril, has a realism almost unknown outside of Roman portraiture. (There are at least two other bust appliques with the same composition, but they are in completely different styles from our piece and have both been dated, perhaps on insufficient evidence, relatively early in Hellenistic times).

Other elements carry us further into Roman Republican or Early Imperial times. The vessel's lip is decorated front and back with flat plates of cut-out scrollwork. This cut and curled ornament is a Roman fashion, at its height in the metalware of the first century B.C.E. The miniature cup held by the young satyr is decorated around the lip with scrollwork in the same style and is fitted with thumb-plates, loop handles, and finger-rests like those familiar from silver drinking cups of the first centuries B.C.E. and C.E. The cut-out ivy-leaf shaped plates connecting the spool feet with the body or our piece are also very Roman. The large repousse vine leaf under the back handle seems a spontaneous creation, loosely inspired by the applique vine-leaf attachment plates of oinochoe handles.

The delicate foliate ornament worked in relief below the bust recalls another forerunner for th

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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