1965.24

Mug (type B)

Ht (lip) 15.7cm; diam. 14.5cm.

Double handle with Herculean knot at the shoulder, parting at the junction with the lip. Double-grooved foot separated from the body by a stem which is reserved. The resting surface is black but the inner face of the foot and the underside of the floor are reserved, the latter decorated with two broad circles. There is no wash inside the vase.

The scene on the body comprises three women: the one on the left rests her left foot on a rise in the ground and carries a cage or basket in her left hand and a mirror in her right. The woman in the centre is seated to left on a rock and has a box in her right hand and a tall flower stem in her left. The third woman stands three-quarter left and holds a situla in her right hand and a sash in her left. There are rosettes and flowers in the field. There is a palmette design below the handle. Above the scene, at the shoulder, a band of egg and dot; below, wave pattern. On the neck is ivy with incised stem and three-dot fruit in added white.

In red-figure the shape (the mug type B) is first known in Athens decorated by the Brygos Painter, and, although it does not run much past the middle of the fifth century, it continues as a popular shape in Attic black-glaze to the first quarter of the fourth. Even if not a favourite shape in Apulian red-figure, it is not rare and seems to have had a local popularity in Canosa; see L. Forti, Atti e Memorie della Società Magna Grecia 8, 1967, 109ff. For the classification of the mug types in Apulia, see Cambitoglou, Papers of the British School at Rome 19, 1951, 40 n. 4.

The vase is attributed to the Menzies Painter but one may note that the drawing is more elaborate than on most of the other pieces in the Group.

J.R. Green with B. Rawson, Catalogue of Antiquities in the Australian National University, A.N.U. (Canberra, 1981) 56; A.D. Trendall and A. Cambitoglou, The Red-Figured Vases of Apulia, ii (Oxford 1982) 827 no. 96, pl. 312, 1.