Black-Figure Lekythos (Oil Vessel): Komos (Revel) (c. 500 BCE): Art, History and Details

Black-Figure Lekythos (Oil Vessel): Komos (Revel) (c. 500 BCE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is The Group of Cleveland 16.1061 (name vase).

The work and its context

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

Three bearded figures dance or cavort on this oil vessel, each wreathed, loosely draped with a cloak, and holding a staff. The central figure also holds a drinking horn, though all may well have been drinking. The painter of this vase is unknown, but the style of drawing has been linked to a similar vessel now in Syracuse, Sicily.

Object facts

• Title: Black-Figure Lekythos (Oil Vessel): Komos (Revel)
• Date: c. 500 BCE
• Creator attribution: The Group of Cleveland 16.1061 (name vase)
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: ceramic
• Dimensions: Overall: 27 cm (10 5/8 in.)
• Collection: GR - Greek
• Department: Greek and Roman Art
• Accession number: 1916.1061

A detail from the museum

The small black marks between and around the figures are mock letters, perhaps indicating illiteracy.

Collection credit

Gift of Amadio Canessa

Further reading listed by the museum

• Beazley Archive. n.d. Beazley Archive Pottery Database. Oxford: Beazley Archive.
• "Accessions." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 4, no. 2 (1917): 26-37.
• Boulter, C. G. Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, United States of America, Fascicule 15, Cleveland Museum of Art, Fascicule 1. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971.

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.