Aryballos

CORINTHIAN ARYBALLOS
Shape and Ornament: Footed aryballos, with rounded body and curved strap handle. Flat top of mouth decorated with three concentric circles and rays, dots on edge of lip. Above warrior's head, tongue pattern above two lines. Three bands below frieze, four concentric bands on underside of base.
Subject: A large warrior's head is facing right. Flanking it are two standing panthers, whose tails interlock on reverse of vase. Filler rosettes with incised centers and dots.
Accessory Colors: Purple, dots.
Middle Corinthian. Attributed to the Painter of Berlin F 1090 by D. Amyx. About 580 B.C.-- Wisseman, Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, Plate 4, 1-2.

The flat-bottomed aryballow in Urbana (Univerity of Illinois) can be no earlier than the introduction of aryballoi decorated in this way with huge human protomai, probably no earlier than the midpoint of Middle Corinthian. The best published examples are those by the Otterlo and Galera Painters. Stylistically, the Urbana aryballos is unlike those, but it participates in the same fad. The head, with its trowel-shaped beard, profile and incised mouth, is consonant with the Pushkin and British Museum Boreads. The nose is a little more exaggerated, the whole somewhat simplified (note the ear) although enlarged. The panthers (the basis of the original attribution to the same hand as Louvre MNB 630) are perfectly consonant with the advanced-MC painters in the Berlin F 1090 list; even the hooked-loop shoulder on these two (hardly exclusive to the Laurion Painter) recurs on other pieces to be considered here. As on Essen R E 19, therefore, the anthropoid part of the decoration entails "Taucheira," the feline "F 10909." Lawrence, 1998.

Wisseman, Sarah U. Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum. Philipp von Zabern: Mainz, 1989. Page 6, Plate 4 , 1-2.

Amyx, D. A. Corinthian Vase-Painting of the Archaic Period, Volume 1, Catalogue, 1988, p.176, no. 14.

Lawrence, Patricia. "The Luxus Phenomenon, I." Hesperia, 1998, Vol 67, no. 3, pp. 303-322.