Mastoid (Drinking Cup) (500-480 BCE): Artwork and History

Mastoid (Drinking Cup) (500-480 BCE) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as Attributed to the Manner of the Haimon Painter Greek; Athens.

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

This drinking cup depicts Herakles’s fight with the Cretan Bull, represented twice in the continuous frieze around the vase; there is a long dotted vine or ivy branch above. The hero stoops low to grasp the bull by one horn, forcing it to its knees. Behind him, as if suspended in the branch, is his cloak and his sword in its scabbard. To the left of one scene crouches a figure with a cloak around one arm and a club (presumably Iolaos with Herakles’s club), while to the left of the second version of the scene is a striding Athena, arm outstretched and covered with her snake-lined aegis - she wears a helmet and carries a spear.

Object facts

• Title: Mastoid (Drinking Cup)
• Date: 500-480 BCE
• Artist attribution: Attributed to the Manner of the Haimon Painter Greek; Athens
• Place of origin: Athens
• Medium: terracotta, black-figure
• Dimensions: 8.5 × 10 × 10 cm (3 7/16 × 4 × 4 in.)
• Type: Vessel
• Department: Arts of Greece, Rome, and Byzantium
• Reference number: 1889.120

Collection credit

Museum Purchase Fund

View the original

Explore the artwork in the Art Institute's collection, including its image and the museum's current catalogue details.

The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.