Dear Steve,
With regard to your wonderful
Julia Mamaea at Nicaea: I knew that the
Berlin vase by the Ram
Jug Painter, being fragmentary and as old as the
style is, Middle Protoattic, c. 670 BCE, might be difficult for those unaccustomed to this art. But your coin, at the
head of this
thread, IS
Peleus Bringing the Infant Achilles to the Good Centaur Cheiron, Tutor of Heroes, and now that I can make a combined image larger than 200 KB by joining my museum photos of the curved surface, I
hope that you can make it out.
Reading l. to r., the
head of Peleus, then, on Peleus forearm, the infant Achiiles (hair, sleeve, dotted shirt, little
arm), then, facing them, coming from the other
side of the vase, the
centaur Cheiron, with
his emblem, an unrooted pine tree, over
his shoulder (note
his layered hair, like that of little
Achilles), on which hang
his prey. Typically in later art you might have a
hare, a cat cub, and a cervid. There is always a lot of discussion when you teach this remarkable Homeric illustration, not very much later than the poems themselves, as to which animal is which (and then they all fail to learn that it is Attic, 7th c., Early Archaic, red-clay, not yet really black-figure
pottery, or even who Peleus was).
If you can just 'read' the Ram
Jug Painter's
style, you will see that this is just the same presentation as on
Julia Mamaea's coin about
900 years later. I think this will be big enough, and it's only 224KB.
Pat L.
Taken with a pre-digital camera hand-held, here is the copy of Apelles' painting with the
Centaur seated. It is from the
Basilica at Herculaneum.
CLICK on images.
