Michael Padgett, The Kleophrades Painter

Shapes: Hydriai and Kalpides

The hydria was among the shapes most favored by the Kleophrades Painter. The earliest, Salerno 1371 (ARV2, 188, 67), is the old black-figure shape and has black palmettes below the main scene of youths courting boys. The satyrs robbing the sleeping Herakles on the shoulder are close in style to those skulking behind Herakles on the painter's early psykter in Compiègne.¹ The painter's other hydriae are of the kalpis type, most of them with framed pictures on the shoulder. The patterns of the lower and lateral frames are nearly always the same: tongues below and a pomegranate-net on the sides.² The upper frames vary: key-pattern, maeander and box, "Tau" maeander. The broad band of ornament below the panel, in the handle zone, is always filled with palmettes, which may be black or reserved, upright or slanted, back to back or lying on their sides. On Rouen 25 (ARV2, 188, 68), satyrs are again stealing up on a sleeping figure, this time a maenad, whose thigh is stroked by her excited admirer. The subject is repeated on the fragmentary vase in the Getty, Malibu 85.AE.188, but there the satyr is masturbating.³ Beazley called this vase "very early," but it is no earlier in style than the "early" Villa Giulia 50398 (ARV2, 188, 69), with Herakles wrestling the Nemean Lion. The other kalpides are all later. On a vase in the Wilhelm collection, Basel (ARV2, 189, 73), the maenads with Dionysos are "flying": i.e. dancing with their chiton sleeves pulled over their hands.⁴ On Louvre G 50 and Leiden PC 83 (ARV2, 188, 70-71) the action is more violent, with Lapiths battling centaurs and Herakles slaying the Egyptian king Busiris.

On Naples 2422 (ARV2, 189, 74), the so-called Vivenzio Hydria, the figures are not confined to a panel but extend around the shoulder in a panorama of the Sack of Troy (

;

;

;

). In the center, Neoptolemos is killing Priam, who sits on the altar holding his bleeding head, his dead grandson Astyanax in his lap. Trojan women and warriors cower and fall on either side. The naked Cassandra is pulled from the statue of Athena by the lesser Ajax, who does not notice Aeneas escaping with his father Anchises. On the opposite side, the sons of Theseus rescue their grandmother Aithra, and a Trojan woman attacks a Greek with a corn-pounder. The composition is sweeping and complex, with even the subsidiary ornament — running spirals above, slanted palmettes below — contributing to the sense of rolling destruction. The air of grief and pathos are a departure for the painter and indeed for Attic vase-painting up to this time; in this sense, the Naples hydria is a harbinger of the Early Classical style.⁵

Three of the painter's kalpides adopt a different decorative scheme, with the figures set lower down on the body and only their heads extending over the shoulder. The women bathing on London E 201 (ARV2, 189, 77) are represented with the same unabashed frontal nudity as the Cassandra on the Vivenzio Hydria (

) and the flute-girl on Würzburg L 507 (

; ARV2, 181, 1). Their boyish hips are characteristic of the artist, who seems to have been less than comfortable drawing the female form.⁶ The erastes and eromenos who face each other, unframed, on the kalpis Villa Giulia 50398 (ARV2, 189, 75) might be taken as indicating that the artist had a taste for boys, were it not that many painters represent both types of courting.⁷ On one of his latest works, the kalpis Munich 2426 (ARV2, 189, 76), the painter employed the scheme adopted on his neck-amphorae of isolating a single, unframed figure on the body: Iris carrying the infant Hermes.