Vase painting sometimes had a sculptural quality, and from an early period Herakles’ tidy coiffure and beard was a recipient of an attractive additive technique, with Euphronios being an early and great master of it. This fragment of a krater in Milan has all the highlights…
Here the hero is in unrelenting profile, with that fringed unblinking eye oriented frontally in the archaic manner. Encased within the lightly stippled hide and jutting teeth of the Nemean lion’s skin, the hero’s beard and sideburns are rendered in raised little globes of clay all coated with a glossy black slip.
These “raised black dots or bubbles” (quoting Beazley) are a wonderful and weird aspect of the potters’ trade, with the little globules adhered to the surface of the wet clay before firing and before the application of the variegated clay slip that would transform it into glossy black in the kiln.
Herakles through the ages was especially well-groomed, an enduring gentlemanly aspect fun to think about in the face of his other excesses!
