Recently-Published Nonfiction Reads I

          One of the recently-published books I’ve been reading is Nigel Spivey’s The Sarpedon Krater: The Life and Afterlife of a Greek Vase (2019). The Sarpedon Krater was already the best example of the late sixth century BC vase painter Euphronios and the first Greek vase to fetch over a million dollars, but Spivey sets out to make “the case for regarding it as an eminent and influential achievement within world culture”(10). America did not have much of Euphronios’s work when the krater was found by grave-robbers in 1971 in Cerveteri, a necropolis in the Greppe Sant’Angelo area of what had been Etruria, north of Rome. They sold it to a middleman, Giacomo Medici, and he sold it to Robert Hecht, a Basel antiquarian dealer who had enough respectability to deal with collectors and museums. Hecht invented a provenance for the krater—it had supposedly been in the collection of a Beirut antique merchant named Sarrafian and had belonged to his family since WWI or had been bought in a lot of ceramics in London in 1920—and Hecht sold the krater for a million dollars to Thomas Hoving, the director of the Metropolitan Museum, in 1972, where it was put on display that November. Hoving probably did not believe Hecht’s story but asked few questions. When the krater’s true provenance became clear, a later Met director allowed it to be repatriated to Italy in 2008, and it is now in the Cerveteri Museum.

             The Euphronios Sarpedon Krater is eighteen inches high and twenty-one inches in diameter at the mouth, a mixing bowl (κράσις=blending) for wine, water, and any other ingredients. On one side it depicts a scene from the 16^th book of the Iliad: Zeus, after briefly considering whether he should spare his son Sarpedon, a Lykian ally of the Trojans, allows him to be killed by Patroclus, and then instructs Apollo to take him from the battlefield and give him to Sleep and Death to take back to his home in Lykia. Euphronios depicts the moment the body is handed over to Sleep and Death, not by Apollo but by Hermes, easily recognized and not so pretty as Apollo, who might draw attention away from the main figure of Sarpedon. The krater is signed by Euphronios, who worked in Athens until 470BC and probably painted this piece about 510BC. It was made for a symposium or drinking gathering, perhaps by special order though this motif shows up on other works by Euphronios and by others. There are other things painted on the krater. The figures are identified by name and there are other words; for example, ΛΕΑΓΡOΣ ΚΑΛΟΣ, “Leagros is beautiful.” This remark shows up on the pottery of Euphronios and others thought to be in his workshop, and Spivey speculates that Leagros was the shop’s proprietor. On these works, Spivey writes, “images do not exist independently of words.”

            How do the pots get to Etruscan graves? Cerveteri was a primary contact point between Greeks and Etruscans. Half of the work attributed to Euphronios showed up at Cerveteri. Greek producers must have known what the Etruscans liked, and have given it to them. Spivey speculates that the Etruscans were aware of the Homeric context and were not just looking for vessels with images of death for their burial sites. He imagines that the symposium was common in Etruria also, and that ordinary ware was chosen when the Etruscans furnished a burial room.

            Spivey argues that the Sarpedon motif came to represent an untimely and heroic end as well as noble or divine mourners. Greek plays in the original or translated into Latin also spread the Sarpedon narrative, first through Greek-speaking lands and then throughout the Roman Empire. The image on the krater has parallels in the bearing of Memnon’s body, or Hector’s body or any grieving bystanders and a transported corpse. Achilles also imagines his own father grieving when his son comes to be killed, as he must. The image is a fungible one of transporting and mourning the dead. The most extensive reworking of the image is in Roman sarcophagi of the imperial period. A lot of these were in fact made by Greek sculptors working in Asia Minor.

            In his last chapter, Spivey takes the Sarpedon image into the Christian era. He invokes Aby Warburg and Ernst Gombrich in arguing that “one image is usually begotten by another” in art (192). Gombrich said that artists until the Renaissance repeat what they have learned, relying on “the formulas evolved in classical art” (Gombrich, Art and Illusion), and thereafter they still start with those formulas, but modify them to their own purposes. Warburg called the motif of the dead body being carried—down from the cross, into the tomb—Pathosformel, and he showed the formula going back to ancient pagan sarcophagi; where Warburg begins is where Spivey’s classical story ended. Pisano, Donatello, Michelangelo, Raphael and others in their depositions and pietás are using one or more of the features of the Sarpedon motif, the hanging arm or braccio della morte that signals the body is dead, the athleticism of the chest and abdomen ( Sarpedon has a six-pack) and the tendency to tilt the body toward the observer so it can be seen, the heroic size of the figure in relation to its bearers and their straining to lift it, its necessarily being unclothed as much as possible, and so on.

            Spivey makes a convincing case for me. There is a lot of information here, and the narrative may be more fragmented than it needs to be over several chapters, but I think he has assembled the examples, which are nicely reproduced, and used them to make a good argument.