Amphora of Hermonax in Würzburg
The amphora of Hermonax in Würzburg is a neck amphora , which was created by the early classical Attic vase painter Hermonax in the red-figure style of Greek vase painting around the year 450 BC. Was manufactured.
The neck amphora was found in an Etruscan tomb in Vulci . First it came into the Feoli collection , today it belongs to the antiquities collection of the Martin von Wagner Museum in Würzburg , where it is presented with a lid that does not belong to it. Both the execution of the pottery and the content of the picture are typical of the vases of this time. There are hundreds of vase pictures that vary in detail on the theme of the warrior farewell. The drawings on this amphora , which was assigned by John D. Beazley to Hermonax, stand out from the average of the representations by their quality.
On the front you can see a young woman helping a young man with equipping. Both wear only one chiton , it is suspected that the young man will also wear a two-piece shirt and skirt. While the young man puts on his sword slightly bent down - the greaves would actually be canonical here - she hands him the helmet with movable cheek flaps and forehead shield and also holds the round shield with a snake ready as a shield sign . Armor, greaves and lance are missing. These weapons had been common for Attic hoplites since the Persian Wars , although at the time the vase was made, the Athenian fleet was the far more important part of the Attic armed forces. The hoplite nonetheless remained the defensive citizen ideal and was depicted in an idealizing form for a long time. Long hair was also no longer in fashion when the vase was made and is reminiscent of the late archaic, heroic times of the Persian Wars.
There are two theories as to who can be seen here. On the one hand, it is assumed that the young man is Achilles , who receives the weapons manufactured by Hephaestus for the Trojan War from his mother Thetis , and that the image alludes to a scene from the 19th book of Homer's Iliad . A detail preserved on this vase could support this theory. Several lines of the vase painter's preliminary drawing have been preserved under the shield. The preliminary drawing was scratched with a wooden pen in the half-dry clay before the fire and in the glossy shade that was used for painting and which was applied before the fire. As you can see there, the female figure was initially conceived as a nude. In Greek art, only goddesses, divine-mythological beings such as maenads or nymphs or prostitutes were generally depicted naked.
A second theory sees the young man, who was probably not yet married according to Attic customs at this age, as a simple Greek warrior who is preparing for a war effort. However, such a scene can only happen in a family environment. The woman depicted is too young for the mother, so it must be the young man's sister. It is possible that Hermonax had consciously made a change in the sphere from the divine to the human. Another argument in favor of the second variant is that, in addition to the huge weapons, both people appear very delicate and not very divine.
The back of the vase shows a man with a lance who is about to set off and receives a sacrificial bowl from a woman, which she fills from a jug. This can be interpreted as the religious side of the start of war, the farewell sacrifice.
literature
- John D. Beazley : Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters. 2nd edition, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1963, p. 487 no.55.
- Irma Wehgartner : Excerpt from a young warrior , In: Ulrich Sinn , Irma Wehgartner (Ed.): Encounter with antiquity. Evidence from four millennia of Mediterranean culture in the south wing of the Würzburg Residence , Ergon, Würzburg 2001, ISBN 3-935556-72-1 , pp. 90–91.
Web links
supporting documents
- ↑ inventory number HA 117 (= L 504); Beazley Archive Database Number 205438.
- ↑ Homer, Iliad 19:10.