Red-Figure Bell Krater (Mixing Vessel): Aphrodite and Eros (c. 370–360 BCE): Art, History and Details

Red-Figure Bell Krater (Mixing Vessel): Aphrodite and Eros (c. 370–360 BCE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Graz Painter (South Italian, Apulian, active c. 380–360 BCE).

The work and its context

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

This small mixing vessel shows a finely dressed woman seated on a chest and holding up a mirror to admire herself. Before her stands Eros, the winged god of love, holding a ribbon or sash. Behind the woman stands a pillar with the inscription ΑΦΡΟΔΙΤΗ, or APHRODITE, the goddess of love. Such labels are rare on vases, and scholars debate whether this names the woman shown as Aphrodite herself, with her son Eros, or a bride envisioning herself as Aphrodite, just before her wedding.

Object facts

• Title: Red-Figure Bell Krater (Mixing Vessel): Aphrodite and Eros
• Date: c. 370–360 BCE
• Creator attribution: Graz Painter (South Italian, Apulian, active c. 380–360 BCE)
• Culture: South Italian, Apulian
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: ceramic
• Dimensions: Overall: 30.5 cm (12 in.)
• Collection: GR - South Italy
• Department: Greek and Roman Art
• Accession number: 1924.534

A detail from the museum

The dancing nude youths on the reverse are unusual; typically they would be standing and draped.

Collection credit

Gift of J. H. Wade

Further reading listed by the museum

• Beazley Archive. n.d. Beazley Archive Pottery Database. Oxford: Beazley Archive.
• "A note on Greek Design: Recent Accessions of Pottery." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 11, no. 10. (December 1924): 198-199
• Boulter, C. G., Jenifer Neils, and Gisela Walberg. Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum. 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.