But this one piece – probably a product of a Western Greek workshop – is different. The majority of Greek pottery that made its way to Italy was decorated with easily (I think?) interpreted mythological scenes, an element of the pan-Mediterranean koiné that had developed by then. That is, inscriptions (with any narrative quality), written sources (there are none for the seventh century BC), or even other vases of this nature. While we have a plethora of written sources for the relationship between Greeks and Etruscans in the early years of Aegean settlement in the waters around Italy, we have few first-hand accounts. But for others it may seem very odd.īut there is a good reason why I have devoted so much time to thinking about this vessel. For anyone interested in the globalizing world of the central Mediterranean in the period before Roman domination, this may not be a shock. I have spent fewer hours thinking about things that I lust after than about the so-called Aristonothos Krater. It is archived on this website with the kind permission of the author. Nonetheless, certain new evidence from excavations conducted at both Akrotiri and the recently discovered site at Raos, is the stimulus for a reconsideration of the topic, or at least some of its aspects.This article was originally published on Ancient World Magazine.
Over the years since that paper, there has been no essential change in the general picture regarding pictorial pottery and mural painting from the last habitation phase on Thera. I also suggested that the representations on certain Late Cycladic I ceramic vessels were influenced by those of wall-paintings and, conversely, that the swallow motif crossed over from pottery to Theran frescoes at the beginning of the LC I period. In that paper I had argued that local Theran pattern-painted pottery (both Cycladic and Minoanizing shapes) comprises the richest corpus of pictorial motifs in the Aegean at the beginning of the Late Bronze Age. I had examined the relationship between pottery and wall-painting for the first time in 1997, at the conference organized on the Thera wall-paintings, in my paper entitled “The Attraction of the Pictorial: Observations on the Relationship of Theran Pottery and Theran Fresco Iconography”, which was published in the conference proceedings.
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