After the Bacchic frenzy comes the crash, apparently. The sleeping woman here is beautiful in her slumber – her face a study of strong, peaceful features (rounded chin, straight nose, and best of all those carefully outlined lips) beneath fanned out curls.
Her weary head rests on a pile of fancy cushions – a sure signal of domestic interior somewhat at odds by other indications of her identity. For this is certainly a maenad, taking an impromptu nap after a bout of ecstatic woodland dancing. The Kleophrades Painter was one of the first and finest vase painters to render drapery as a sort of billowy plissé – slightly diaphanous and tactilely crinkly….a fashion statement nearly exclusively reserved for maenads. Her loose curls (perhaps a bit cropped?) are another good indication that this is no sleepy matron.
But what really cinches her identity is another fragment from the same shoulder of the vase (a kalpis) on which she sleeps. A really raunchy little satyr (second photo) perches towards the left of the frame, in the midst of his own sort of ecstasy (complete with the inscribed cry ‘[I see] two suns!’).
The beautiful dreamer and rude interloper combination is a repeating scene on Late Archaic vase vases, with the painters evidently enjoying the usually disastrous hijinks of over-eager satyrs when sneaking up on formidable maenads in moments of repose…
