Tombs of Exekias

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Exhibition of the grave tablets in the Berlin Collection of Antiquities

The grave tablets of Exekias are a multi-part antique work of art by the Attic vase painter Exekias .

In modern research, the vase painter Exekias , who worked in Athens , is considered the most important representative of his craft in the black-figure style . So it is not surprising that the artist was apparently particularly appreciated in his time and received commissions for works that went far beyond normal vase painting. The 16 clay tablets ( pinakes ) that adorned a grave building are an outstanding testimony to his skills . They are each 43 × 37 cm in size and are made between 540 and 530 BC. Dated. In contrast to vase painting, painting so many large and open areas required a different style of design than a vase painter was used to.

The fragmentary remains of the panels were acquired for the Berlin Antikensammlung in 1875 (cat. F 1811 - F 1826). According to the trader, they were found in 1872 in the Kerameikos , which was partially the cemetery of Athens. Another corresponding fragment was later found in the Athens National Museum (Inv. 20061).

Exekias produced another set of such grave pinakes, four fragments of which have been preserved in the Athens National Museum.

description

The 16 panels are all only fragmentary today. The central motif seems to have been the lament for the dead ( prothesis ) . Fortunately, the motif belongs to one of the two best-preserved panels. The domestic setting of the scenery is marked by two white columns in the foreground. The dead body laid out on a kline is adorned with a necklace and a myrtle wreath and placed on a raised pedestal. Behind the head end, a servant bends over the dead woman. Only a few remains of the mourning women in the background and on the edge have survived. In the foreground are a young girl and a man who had shorn their hair short as a sign of mourning. It is rendered unusually individually with an aquiline nose, and its name was also included. Since the death lament was generally only attended by women, it can be assumed that the man was the closest relative, certainly the husband, of the deceased. He is certainly also the customer of the grave monument and thus the grave tablets.

On the two panels to the left of the scene described there are further death lament scenes. Another ten panels are followed by an elaborate funeral procession ( Ekphora ) with male and female choirs, riders and teams of four. Apparently the power and representation claim of a noble family are to be represented here. The leader of the funeral procession turns his gaze to the viewer, almost as if he wanted to address him. This inclusion of the viewer and the seriousness of the facial expression is unusual for archaic Greek art.

detail
Silent death lament of women

The scene to the right of the mourning for the dead does not belong to the dead ritual, it gives an insight into the private, family area. You see a group of women, some of whom are sitting on chairs and are united in silent sorrow. A well-dressed woman has pulled her coat over her head and rested her chin on her hand. Possibly this is the mother of the dead. In the background three women pass a newborn boy around. This should also clarify the cause of death of the woman who apparently died in childbirth or in childbed . This private scene of mourning and worrying about the baby is something new for archaic art and evidently arose between the client and the artist in close consultation.

Another pioneering achievement is the representation of a team of mules and the servant who led this team. The servant supports the drawbar of the wagon with a white pole to relieve the animals. The individual and natural animal representations, which go beyond the formulaic representations of the noble horses, are unique for black-figure vase painting. The servant falls completely out of the noble form of representation of the funeral procession. He is shown particularly small (meaning size), naked, shows an ignoble demeanor and a disproportionate body. The harnessing of the car is the only real action scene in the entire frieze and symbolizes the relentlessness of the last farewell. In addition, this scene connects the two plot scenes of the mourning for the dead and the procession of the dead.

Find, research and exhibition history

In 1875 the Berlin museums were able to acquire several fragments of a set of Attic pinakes painted in the black-figure style in the art trade . According to the art dealer, all of these pieces were found in 1872 behind an orphanage at Piraeusstrasse 86 in Athens . The site is located on the outskirts of the ancient Kerameikos district and is now completely built with modern houses. The location suggests that the fragments were parts of a grave ornament, as this part of the Kerameikos was a necropolis . Two of the panels were almost completely assembled when they were bought, some of which were modernized and some were painted over. The rest of the find consisted of another 45 unrelated individual fragments.

Adolf Furtwängler published the pieces ten years later in his catalog of vases in the Berlin Collection of Antiquities. In it he reconstructed 15 panels, which he provided with the catalog numbers 1811 to 1825. The unassigned fragments were given catalog number 1826. In 1888, Maxime Collignon published drawings of fragments of the prosthesis depicted , the mourning in the women's room and two other fragments, and was the first to suggest a connection to Exekias. Another careful publication followed in 1891/92 in the Ancient Monuments , in the case of the two almost complete panels on watercolors , in the case of ten important fragments on the basis of colored photos. These are still valuable testimonies today, as the colors were even better preserved at that time than they are today. Another four fragments were shown in drawings. The descriptions were written by Gustav Hirschfeld . In the Festschrift for Johannes Overbeck he reconstructed 12 panels in 1893 and was able to accommodate 34 of the 45 fragments here.

A first classification of the panels as a work of outstanding importance in archaic Greek art and attribution to the painter Exekias was made in 1925 by Andreas Rumpf in his review in the “ Gnomon ” of Ernst Pfuhl's “Painting and Drawing of the Greeks”:

“And yet there are works by the hand of Exekias at the same time as the Vatican amphora, larger than this not only in scale, richer in motifs, more excellent in technique, more careful in execution and with a well-preserved surface. They belonged not only to the focus of the works of Exekias, but as the most important achievements of the Attic art of drawing around the middle of the century, the earlier and later works should have been measured. "

Pfuhl put his opinion into perspective as early as 1924 in “Masterpieces of Greek Drawings and Painting” and praised the proximity to great art and the anticipation of classical art. Rumpf was also the first archaeologist to expressly attribute the grave tablets to Exekias as a painter. Shortly thereafter, the assignment was also taken over by John D. Beazley , the important researcher of Attic vase painting , and has been considered secure ever since. In 1934 Werner Technau published again most of the fragments in his Exekias monograph without commenting on them.

Up until the Second World War , the two assembled panels and several of the large fragments were on display, 35 fragments were in a magazine. They also stayed in the Pergamon Museum's storage facility while the pieces from the exhibition were relocated and from 1946 onwards were kept in the Kunstgutlager Schloss Celle . Two small fragments were lost during the retrieval. In 1957/58 the pieces came back to West Berlin from Celle. They were one of the showpieces of the collection of the Antikenmuseum in the Stüler building of Charlottenburg Palace . On the occasion of the reorganization of the exhibition in 1974, some of the fragments were restored and all fragments in West Berlin were combined into seven panel units. They were attached to plexiglass plates and attached to the wall. In 1989, an exchange was agreed between the two museums, which provided that the West Berlin collection should receive the 35 fragments of the East Berlin collection and in return the East Berlin collection should receive twelve heads of the Telephos frieze of the Pergamon Altar, which were located in West Berlin. However, with the political reunification and the associated amalgamation of the antique collection on Museum Island, this swap became obsolete. The best-preserved panels and a large part of the fragments are currently on display in the Altes Museum . A signed amphora des Exekias ( inv. F 1720 ) and an amphora from group E (inv. F 1717) are also exhibited with the pinakes .

It was not until the reunification of the East and West Berlin collections of antiquities that all preserved pieces could be studied again. Despite these problems, John Boardman made a new proposal for the arrangement of the fragments in 1955. It was not until the publication of Heide Mommsen's first part of an Exekias monograph in 1997 that the entire table series again became the subject of research. Until then, only parts of the pinakes, the two almost complete panels and several of the larger fragments, had been depicted and examined in several places. Mommsen published ten previously unpublished fragments for the first time. In 1978 Martin Robertson discovered a fragment in the magazine of the Athens Museum that he was able to assign to one of the Berlin tablets. In doing so, he raised the hope that even more fragments might be found in the future.

In the Athens National Museum there are four other smaller fragments of tomb pinakes, which are attributed to Exekias (inv. 2414–2417). For a long time these pieces were assigned to the Berlin cycle. However, due to the different locations and the different heights of the headband, John Boardman was able to prove that these are pieces from a different series.

classification

In addition to the grave pinakes of Exekias today in Berlin and his second series of grave pinakes in Athens, a large number of other grave pinakes are known. They all show the representation of the prothesis, the ekphora and mourning women and men. Between the last quarter of the 7th century BC BC and the middle of the 6th century, series of grave pinakes can be identified, from around 530 BC. Until the 5th century BC Chr. Only single pieces are known. One of the best-preserved individual pieces is a Pinax in the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a representation of the prosthesis in the upper scene and a representation of a chariot race, probably at the funeral games , in the lower frieze. Besides the Pinakes des Exekias, those by Sophilus , Lydos the Gela Painter and the Sappho Painter are known; most of the pieces are not assigned to any painter.

literature

  • John D. Beazley : Attic Black-figure Vase-painters . Clarendon Press, Oxford 1956, p. 146 No. 22.
  • Heide Mommsen : Exekias I. The grave tablets (= research on ancient ceramics . Series 2 Kerameus , Volume 11). Philipp von Zabern, Mainz 1997, ISBN 3-8053-2033-7 .
  • Heide Mommsen: "Stand still and file the lawsuit ...". On the reunited fragments of Exekias' grave tablets . In: EOS. Messages for friends of antiquity on Museum Island Berlin 12, August 2000, pp. IV – VII.
  • Heide Mommsen: Four fragments of a series of grave plaques . In: Christoph Reusser , Martin Bürge (ed.): “Exekias painted and pottered me” Exhibition in the Archaeological Collection of the University of Zurich, November 9, 2018 to March 31, 2019 . Archaeological Collection of the University of Zurich, Zurich 2018, ISBN 978-3-905099-34-8 , pp. 295-300 No. 19.

Web links

Commons : Tombs of Exekias  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Heide Mommsen: Exekias I. The grave tablets . Philipp von Zabern, Mainz 1997, ISBN 3-8053-2033-7 , p. 3.
  2. ↑ Adolf Furtwängler: Description of the vase collection in the Antiquarium . Volume 1, Berlin 1885, pp. 315-324 ( digitized version ).
  3. ↑ Maxime Collignon: Plaques funéraires de terre cuite peinte trouvées à Athènes (Musée de Berlin) . In: Gazette archéologique 13, 1888, pp. 225–232 ( digitized version ).
  4. ↑ Antique monuments, Volume 2, 1891/92, pp. 4–6, plates 9–11 ( digitized text , tables ).
  5. ↑ Antique monuments, Volume 2, 1891/92, pp. 4–6.
  6. ^ Gustav Hirschfeld: Athenian Pinakes in the Berlin Museum . In: Festschrift for Johannes Overbeck. Essays by his students to celebrate his 40th professorship anniversary . Leipzig 1893, pp. 1–13 ( digitized version ).
  7. ↑ Gnomon Volume 1, 1925, p. 334.
  8. ^ Ernst Pfuhl: Painting and drawing of the Greeks . Bruckmann, Munich 1923, p. 309. 311. 329 Fig. 278.
  9. ^ Ernst Pfuhl: Masterpieces of Greek drawing and painting . Bruckmann, Munich 1924, p. 19 Fig. 26.
  10. ^ Werner Technau: Exekias. (= Research on ancient ceramics . Series I: Pictures of Greek vases . Volume 9). Keller, Leipzig 1936, p. 22, plates 14-18.
  11. ^ ABV 141, 7 Group E, The Group of London B 174.
  12. ↑ John Boardman: Painted Funerary plaques and Some Remarks on prothesis . In: The Annual of the British School at Athens . Volume 50, 1955, pp. 63-66.
  13. ^ Martin Robertson: A new plaque fragment by Exekias . In: Aρχαιoλoγική εφημερίς 1978, pp. 91–94, plate 33; Heide Mommsen: Exekias I. The grave tablets . Philipp von Zabern, Mainz 1997, ISBN 3-8053-2033-7 , plate XIIb.
  14. ↑ Heide Mommsen: Exekias I. The grave tablets . Philipp von Zabern, Mainz 1997, ISBN 3-8053-2033-7 , p. 5.
  15. ↑ John Boardman: Painted Funerary plaques and Some Remarks on prothesis . In: The Annual of the British School at Athens. 50, 1955, p. 59 No. 10; Pp. 63-64; Heide Mommsen: Exekias I. The grave tablets . Philipp von Zabern, Mainz 1997, ISBN 3-8053-2033-7 , pp. 4–5. 62–63 Appendix A – B.
  16. ^ Compiled by John Boardman: Painted Funerary Plaques and Some Remarks on Prothesis . In: The Annual of the British School at Athens. 50, 1955, pp. 51-66, plates 1-8 and Jerrie Pike Brooklyn: Attic Black-Figure Funerary Plaques . Dissertation University of Iowa 1981.
  17. ↑ On the iconography Ingeborg Huber: The Iconography of Mourning in Greek Art . Bibliopolis, Mannheim / Möhnesee 2001, ISBN 3-933925-19-3 , pp. 94-100. 220-221.
  18. ↑ Inv. 54.11.5 (around 520/510); Entry in the museum's database .