Heracles amphora
The Heracles amphora is a pompous Melian amphora in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens with the inventory number 354. It is 102 centimeters high and is around the year 620 BC. Dated.
The Heracles amphora is one of the younger, slimmer specimens of the genus. It got its name after its main picture, which shows Heracles' voyage to the bride . The picture is no longer pressed to the edge, as in older copies of the genre, for reasons of convention, but takes up the entire space. The four figures shown are arranged harmoniously: Oineus says goodbye to Heracles, who is facing him and who simultaneously mounts his chariot. Two horses are harnessed in front of this. Behind the wagon and the horses, Althaia , who is half hidden by the car body , says goodbye . The figures are isocephalic . Details of the clothing, but also faces and other details are finely worked out, the women's robes show Phrygian patterns. All free spaces are filled with filling patterns, rosettes , volutes , meanders and other things. A picture is also shown on the neck: Hermes with winged shoes and a herald's staff stands opposite a richly dressed woman, perhaps it is the nymph Callisto or his mother Maia . Here, too, the open spaces are filled with accessories; the many leaf rosettes behind Hermes are striking. The picture is framed by chessboard patterns, which are interrupted by sphinx metopes. On the amphora, the skin of women is shown in white, that of men in tinted color. Eyes are shown under the handles, so the handles look like eyebrows. The back is only fragmentary, the back of the neck is not preserved at all. You can see two horses standing opposite each other - not uncommon for meliose ornate amphorae.
literature
- Werner Ekschmitt : Art and Culture of the Cyclades, Part II: Geometric and Archaic Time , Mainz am Rhein 1986 ( Kulturgeschichte der Antike , Volume 28.2), pp. 140–142, plate 43 ISBN 3805309007