Revellers Vase

The vase is an amphora (a type of vessel normally used for storage), painted with two scenes: one depicts three nude partygoers, and the other the Trojan hero Hector arming for battle.

It was excavated in 1829 by Lucien Bonaparte from the Etruscan Tomb of the Cuccumella [fr] at Vulci in Italy, and is currently held in the Staatliche Antikensammlungen in Münich, Germany.

[4] Euthymides, along with other painters like Euphronios and Phintias, are known as the Pioneer Group because of their work with the newly invented red-figure style,[5] in which the dark slip painted onto the vase was applied to the background, leaving the foreground rendered by the negative space in the natural color of the clay.

[11] One side of the vase shows three mostly nude male dancers (komasts) engaged in a komos, a wild and usually drunken ritual dance in honor of the god Dionysos,[10] perhaps in the aftermath of an all-male drinking party known as a symposium.

[16] Hector, depicted frontally, wears a chiton (a form of tunic fastened at the shoulder), greaves and a cuirass, which he adjusts.

[18] Hecuba wears a chiton, a wreath and an epiblema-veil: the latter garment was traditionally associated with marriage, but often denoted mythological queens in vase-painting.

[5] Gisela Richter specifically interpreted it as a reference to Euthymides's use of three-quarter views, in contrast with the front-on or side-on perspective universal in Euphronios's work.

[21] The art historian Jeffrey M. Hurwit has called the Revellers Vase the most important of Euthymides's six signed painted works.