Grave of piebalds
The grave of the piebald is a grave from around 340 BC. BC, which was found in the Andriuolo necropolis near Paestum (grave 48). His remains are kept in the National Archaeological Museum in Paestum .
Grave slabs
Three of the four limestone slabs that formed the walls of the inside painted burial chamber have been preserved. The plates on the narrow side of the burial chamber measure 115 × 81 cm, the plate that formed the long side 65 × 153 cm.
The two plates on the narrow sides of the tomb are pentagonal; its gable field is each filled with a palmette and separated from the rectangular image zone by an egg stick framed by lines . One of the plates is in good condition; it shows a boxing match between a light-skinned and a dark-skinned naked man. Except for the bandaged fists, the two fighters are naked. The left, fair-skinned boxer is already getting blood flowing from his nose, and a bloody print of a right hand can be seen on the back of his opponent. However, this hand is open, so the imprint can hardly come from one of the two boxers. To the right of this scene, next to the dark-skinned fighter's raised fist, an oversized pomegranate hovers . The two boxers stand on a broad, red floor line, below which the structure of the floor seems to be indicated by different colored brush dabs. It is unclear what intention the painter had when designing the right leg of the dark-skinned man. An apparently somewhat damaged area of the painting seems to indicate that in one version of the painting it was stretched backwards in a kind of lunge with a bent knee and thus ended above the red floor line. The outline drawing of a foot, which, however, tends to go straight down - above the floor line that was interrupted for it! - hangs, but seems to continue upwards and end in the fighter's waist. However, this leg does not match the position of the pugilist in terms of length or posture, and it is not as clearly colored as the rest of the body.
The plate on the opposite narrow side is poorly preserved, but one can still see that its external composition with palmette, egg stick and floor design corresponds to its counterpart. The picture in the rectangular part of this plate shows two clad men armed with helmets, shields and greaves; the background is filled with oversized pomegranates.
The grave is named after the depiction on the preserved longitudinal plate. Under a red boundary line and between two other large pomegranates (one of which grows out of a red tendril) it shows a quadriga moving to the left, for which it is uncertain whether it will be presented in a race or alone. In contrast to depictions on older tomb paintings from Paestum, such as the grave of the deer hunt or the grave of the pomegranates , the charioteer, clad in a short, striped outer garment, shows a more dynamic posture here; he bends back and seems to use his legs to compensate for the movement of the car on the bumpy ground. He has two reins in his hands that he uses to direct the team, but not a whip. In contrast to the older graves, the car is shown diagonally from the front, you can see the axis between the two four-spoke wheels, which were drawn oval for perspective reasons. In contrast, the four horses - two gray horses with dark manes and two black pelvises with surprisingly brown manes and tails - do not gallop towards the viewer, but from right to left.
The horses are offset from one another so that the front third of each could be shown uncovered, and show a uniform posture right down to the position of the ears and the direction of the gaze: the right front hoof is very high when galloping, the left one reaches further down, the right rear hoof is also raised forward in this phase of the movement and only the left rear hoof is touching the ground or should touch it, because here again a misfortune seems to have happened in the composition of the picture: the rearmost horse is anatomically pretty correctly reproduced, but is floating in the air precisely because the floor line, which has recesses with regard to the wagon wheels, was drawn too early or too late and the position of this piebald could not be taken into account. The only hints of the hind legs of the other three horses sit in anatomically impossible places, their hooves stumble through real "holes" in the ground, which are evidently caused by the fact that the red floor line was started on the left at a height that corresponds to the front legs of the The first horse would still have fit, but in the middle it could not be held because of these sketched hind legs and had to be corrected downwards in order to finally end on the right under or behind the carriage much lower than at the other end of the picture.
Grave goods
One of the grave goods was a neck amphora designed by the painter from Naples in 1778 . The red-figure vessel is 22.5 cm high. On one side a naked ephebe can be seen carrying a tania and a thyrsos staff , on the other a youth in a cloak walking to the left between two tympana . Another burial object was a kylix , the interior of which shows a clad woman turned to the left between a louterion and a palmette. Ivy vines are engraved on the rim of the vessel . The red-figure kylix with a diameter of 19 cm and a height of 6 cm was designed by a painter from the circle of the painter from Würzburg H 5739 . A black varnished patera with a diameter of 15.2 cm and a height of 4.4 cm, which has four stamped palmettes around a circle in the tondo , was also given to the deceased person in the grave.
literature
- Angela Pontrandolfo, Agnès Rouveret: Le tombe dipinte di Paestum. Panini, Modena 1992, ISBN 88-7686-202-1 , pp. 144-145. 333-334
- Bernard Andreae et al. a .: painting for eternity. The tombs of Paestum. Exhibition at Bucerius Kunst Forum Hamburg, October 13, 2007 to January 20, 2008. Hirmer, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-7774-3745-3 , pp. 82–87