Underworld vases

Rape of Persephone. Apulian red-figure volute crater, around 340 BC Chr.

As underworld vases is called in classical archeology Pugliese - red-figure vessels on which scenes were shown from the underworld.

The underworld vases mainly include volute craters . On them, for example, the pair of gods Hades and Persephone are depicted, sometimes enthroned in a palace architecture, Hecate , Dike , the judges of the dead Triptolemos , Aiakos and Rhadamanthys , Orpheus and Eurydice , Heracles as he subdues Kerberos , or Megara and her children. In addition, criminals known from Greek mythology are shown serving their sentence, such as the Danaids , Sisyphus , Tantalus , Theseus , Peirithoos , sometimes with their guardians, Dike or one of the Erinyes . There is no precise typological definition for the design of the images. They show less mythological events than the ideas of the afterlife of the lower Italian Greeks: the deceased can expect either happiness or punishment. A related form are the Naïskos vases .

literature

• Rolf Hurschmann : Unterweltvase , in Der Neue Pauly Vol. 12 (2002), Sp. 1019.
• Konrad Schauenburg : Unterweltbilder aus Großgriechenland , In: Römische Mitteilungen 91 (1984), pp. 359-387
• Konrad Schauenburg: On two underworld craters by the Baltimore painter , In: Archäologischer Anzeiger 1990, pp. 91-100