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Barnebys HQ
Brahegatan 10
BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Asian Art / Apulian Red Figure Lekanis with Female Heads & Palmettes
Southern Italy, Apulia, Greek (Magna Graecia). A twin-handled lekanis, its low footed bowl closed by a domed lid crowned with a broad disc knob. The lid carries two female heads in profile, the so-called ladies of fashion beloved of Apulian painters, their hair bound in a sakkos and their features reserved in the orange clay against a lustrous black ground, each pair separated by a spreading fan palmette with added white dots and rosette fillers. Vertical tongue-stripes run around the lid's edge and the rim of the bowl, and a rayed motif decorates the knob. The horizontal loop handles rise in reserved clay. Such lidded boxes held cosmetics, trinkets, or small offerings, and were frequently placed in graves as gifts for women. The isolated female head, framed by tendrils, palmettes, and scattered white accents, became the signature motif of 4th century BCE Apulian workshops, appearing on lekanides, pelikai, and squat lekythoi in such numbers that scholars once dismissed the painters as mere decorators. Modern study reads the heads more carefully: some are nymphs, some Aphrodite or her attendant Eros, and some may represent the deceased herself, idealized and eternally youthful. On funerary vases the motif carries an Orphic-Dionysiac undertone of rebirth, a reading supported by the flowering tendrils from which the heads so often emerge. The lekanis form itself descends from Attic prototypes and was produced in quantity at Taranto and its satellite centers, where the sakkos-bound head became a workshop shorthand recognizable at a glance. Item # 205020
Estimate:$400
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorAsian Art
Estimate:
$400
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