The Transformation of Athens by Robin Osborne

Author:Robin Osborne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2017-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 5.18–20. Red-figure cup, diameter 0.227 m, attributed to the Calliope Painter, said to be from Magna Graecia. ARV 1259.11, Boston Museum of Fine Arts 21.4. Photograph © 2017 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

To the story of various iconographies ceasing to attract red-figure artists’ attention we have to add the story of scenes that come into red-figure painting for the first time only after 480. The most surprising of these is the wedding scene.63 Wedding scenes had been repeatedly shown in black-figure, particularly in the form of showing the wedding procession with the bride and bridegroom in a chariot, and indeed black-figure versions of this scene continue into the fifth century. But early red-figure shows no interest at all in weddings, and when it does turn to them it does so very largely on vessels that have particular ritual functions at the wedding—the loutrophoros and the nuptial lebes (5.21). By contrast black-figure wedding scenes had appeared on amphoras, kraters, hydrias, and lekythoi. But if the shapes decorated with wedding scenes in red-figure is narrower, the range of scenes is wider. We see the wedding bath, the preparation for the bride, the wedding procession (most often without chariot), and dancing associated with weddings. Notable is what Oakley and Sinos have called the “more romantic mood” created in part by showing both bride and groom as flourishing young people.64 This romantic mood is only enhanced when, shortly after the middle of the fifth century, Eros appears in some wedding scenes, followed shortly afterward by Aphrodite.

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