Black-Figure Kantharos (Drinking Cup): Lizards Flanking Tree (A); Ducks (B) (c. 500 BCE): Art, History and Details

Black-Figure Kantharos (Drinking Cup): Lizards Flanking Tree (A); Ducks (B) (c. 500 BCE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Known as a kantharos and often associated with the wine god Dionysos and the hero Herakles, this type of two-handled drinking cup was particularly popular in Boiotia, a region of central Greece northwest of Athens. Also typical of Boiotia is simple black-figure silhouette decoration, without incision. Here and elsewhere, though, Boiotian vase-painters used red paint for additional detail; note the alternating tree leaves, lizard eyes and spots (on the right), and duck eyes.

Object facts

• Title: Black-Figure Kantharos (Drinking Cup): Lizards Flanking Tree (A); Ducks (B)
• Date: c. 500 BCE
• Culture: Greek, Boiotian
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: ceramic
• Dimensions: Diameter: 10.7 cm (4 3/16 in.); Overall: 11.2 cm (4 7/16 in.); Diameter of foot: 6.1 cm (2 3/8 in.)
• Collection: GR - Greek
• Department: Greek and Roman Art
• Accession number: 1985.175

A detail from the museum

Kantharos, the Greek word for this type of cup, also refers to a dung beetle.

Collection credit

Gift of JoAnn Harris

Further reading listed by the museum

• Beazley Archive. n.d. Beazley Archive Pottery Database. Oxford: Beazley Archive.
• Turner, Evan H. "The Year in Review for 1985." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 73, no. 2 (1986)
• Neils, Jenifer, and Gisela Walberg. Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum: The Cleveland Museum of Art. [Cleveland, OH]: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2000.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.