#ancient vases

[aristoteliancomplacency]

Pixel daily theme was ‘prize’: yet another theme that gives me an excuse to pixel ancient vases. This one is based off this vase. It’s a prize from the Panathenaic games. Made circa 500-490 BCE and attributed to the Eucharides Painter. This side shows Athena. 100x100 px.

The real prize wasn’t the jar itself so much as it’s contents: olive oil. Why? Well, there’s a whole article here about the usages and value of oil in Ancient Greece, but here’s part specifically about it as a prize: “The winner of the boy's 200-meter sprint, for example, was awarded 500 gallons of olive oil and the men's winner 1,000 gallons. This oil was usually re-sold by the winners for roughly 12 drachmas per 10-gallon vessel. To get a sense of the value: if a carpenter collected approximately 1 drachma per day, (a figure drawn from inscriptions excavated on the Acropolis in Athens), that means that an athlete could potentially earn up to three years' worth of wages in a single competition.”

[gettypubs]

In 2008, the Berlin Antikensammlung initiated a project with the J. Paul Getty Museum to conserve a group of ancient funerary vases from southern Italy. Monumental in scale and richly decorated, these magnificent vessels were discovered in hundreds of fragments in the early nineteenth century at Ceglie, near Bari. Acquired by a Bohemian diplomat, they were reconstructed in the Neapolitan workshop of Raffaele Gargiulo, who was considered one of the leading restorers of antiquities in Europe. His methods exemplify what was referred to as “une perfection dangereuse,” an approach to reassembly and repainting that made it difficult to distinguish what was ancient and what was modern. Bringing together archival documentation and technical analyses, Dangerous Perfection provides a comprehensive study of the vases and their treatment from the nineteenth century up to today.