Couldn’t tear myself away from watching the macabre spectacle in the frigid swamp of D.C. just now, which made me think this was a sort of appropriately depressing artwork for the day.
It’s a white ground lekythos, one of the specialized vases with almost exclusively funerary overtones and typically matching imagery. This scene is hard to make out due to the transient nature of the pigment, but shows tireless Charon in outline, boatman of Hades, crossing the River Styx in a boat much more akin to a skiff. He punts across to receive the soul of the deceased (shown in a damaged state in the second image which also shows the glorious shape of the lekythos as a whole), and usher it into the underworld.
‘River’ is somewhat of a misnomer for how the Greeks thought of that boundary between the world of the living and dead. Instead, it was imagined as a putrid, miasmic swamp, and in was painting it was illustrated with appropriate plant-life…in this case reeds. Infernal swamp indeed, eh?
