An Athenian White-Ground Lekythos

In Athenian pottery, by the late 6th century B.C. the shape of the lekythos was more or less standardised into the type we see here, with a tall cylindrical body, a chimney-like neck and a swelling funnel mouth. Black- and red-figure lekythoi were used for domestic purposes. But the so-called white-ground lekythoi, with their coating of a white slip and delicate outline figure drawing, became associated with funerary rituals. Filled with precious oil, they were placed both in and on graves, for the benefit of the deceased.

The Achilles Painter, working in the period between 450 and 425 B.C., was one of the great painters of white ground lekythoi.

The Otago lekythos has been assigned to his workshop. It shares the master's usual iconography on such vases, of a two-figure composition set around a tombstone, and uses pure line with little added colour.

On the shoulder is a palmette design in which the central palmette has shrunk to a single petal.

Below the shoulder runs a band of "stopt" meanders facing alternately right and left and interspersed with saltire crosses. This is a common meander for the Achilles Painter, but its presentation is relatively slipshod in comparison with the work of the Achilles Painter himself, as is some of the line work in the figured scene.

On the body of the vase a woman and a warrior face each other across a tombstone.

The woman stands to the left of the tomb and looks towards the man on the other side. She is dressed in a thin tunic which is belted with an overfold at the waist. Its apparent transparency was probably originally disguised by added colour. With her right arm she gestures to the warrior, while her left points to the foot of the tombstone, which is decorated with a ribbon and a wreath. On top of the gravestone stands a statue of a youth, draped in a cloak and posed in such a way as to echo the stance of the warrior to the right.

This warrior is clad in typically Greek armour: over a short tunic he wears a decorated linen corselet, with long tabs to protect the lower abdomen and groin. His bearded face is covered by a crested "Thracian" helmet decorated, unusually on the neckguard, with the figure of a satyr. In his left hand he holds a large round hoplite shield and in his right a spear.

The meaning of such tomb scenes is not always clear. Is the warrior dead? If so, are we to read the scene as a memorial to a dead warrior, killed in battle, but remembered by his wife in her imagination across the great divide of the tomb? At the time when this lekythos was produced in Athens, the city was at war with her Greek neighbours, and this period witnessed the greatest output of white-ground lekythoi with funerary scenes.