I admit to having a certain preference for the red-figure vases, with their elegant swooping lines, bodacious orange bodies, and fine drapery, and a special fondness great Athenian masters who pioneered and perfected the new technique. Shameful, I’m sure you would agree after taking a gander at this stunner!
It’s from the tondo of a cup made just before the world of pots was turned on its head and this older manner of decoration was discarded for the sexier new style, incised details traded in for painted black. Scraping the minute details into the vases’s surface with a (very pointy) tool meant they had a slightly edgier, choppier quality, and rendering long sinuous lines (while achievable) was a rather fraught business.
The glorious swath of the man’s hair is seriously impressive, floating out behind him with long curls delineated by those frenetic undulating lines. His stark black profile is dominated by that enormous staring eye, thin-lipped expression, and dusted over with a stippling of scruffy beard. Added painted red highlights the fancy wreath and the just visible bits of clothing or armor he wears.
Not enough of the cup survives to establish his identity – I imagine an illustrious hero rushing into battle, Beazley thought perhaps Paris agonizing about female beauty and wrath. Whoever he is, he ended up in Naukratis, the far-flung cosmopolitan trading outpost at the Nile’s delta… wind in his hair.
