Tátrai Vilmos szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 92-93.(Budapest, 2000)
SZILÁGYI, JÁNOS GYÖRGY: "Les Adieux". A Column-krater of the Syracuse Painter
tended for a funerary purpose: in Athens at this time kraters were never placed in graves, burials being modest and characterized by the extreme scarcity of grave-goods. 48 On the other hand all the facts weigh against the presupposition that the Syracuse Painter made his vases for non-Greek customers. His dependence on the Athenian market is proved by his very large production of loutrophoroi, and the diffusion of his known pieces confirms that he did not make them with the needs of long-distance trade in mind. The provenance of almost 90% of his works is known: almost half were found on Greek soil, mostly in Athens itself, the others being thinly spread over Eretria, Tanagra, Halai, Galaxidi, Delos, and Kamiros - almost nowhere, in any event, very far from Attica. The final destiny of a considerable part of Attic vase-production at the time was not however determined by its makers, and often quite independent of the original intentions of the masters themselves, or even of the customers who had first commissioned a given piece. Adventurous and well-informed merchants took the works of the Syracuse Painter also to far-off countries: with the exception of a single hydria found in Cyrenaica, all the exported pieces reached markets in Italy. No meaningful concentration of his works, which might point to the influence of a middleman on at least a part of his production, can be singled out here either; or, to put it more finely, the provenances correspond to the western course of the contemporary two-forked trade-route by which Attic pots reached Italian markets: the largest number were found in Sicily (Gela, Agrigento, Selinunte), a few in Magna Graecia (Mesagne, Locri), some more pieces came from sites in Campania (Nola, Telese, Cumae), and three or four from Etruria (Falerii, Vulci, Bomarzo, Chiusi) and Bologna, in the latter case either via Etruria, or, more likely, from the caput Adriae. The distribution map consequently excludes any possibility that the pictures on the Budapest vase were made by their painter with specifically Italian demands in mind; as for their subject, it would have been comprehensible without much effort in any region exposed to even the slightest influence of Greek culture, and all the sites listed above fall, in our period, within this category. This does not, however, mean that, if not the pictures themselves, at least the shape of the vase would not have attracted considerable attention in some part of Italy. The provenance of the Budapest krater lends added weight to this hypothesis. The krater was discovered in the course of excavations carried out by Teresa Caetani, Duchess of Sermoneta, 49 in a locality of her estate in the territory of ancient Caere between modern Cerveteri and Pyrgi, called Zambra (propr. S. Giovanni dei Fiorentini), 48 See Kurtz, D.C. - Boardman, J., Greek Burial Customs, London 1971, 91 ff.; Morris, I., DeathRitual and Social Structure in Classical Antiquity, Cambridge 1992, 108 ff., considering also the importance of the wide spread of the phenomenon outside Athens. For examples see the excavations in Syndagma Square (Charitonides, S.I., AEph 1958, 1 ff.) and the general survey of the 6 th-5 th c. grave goods of the Kerameikos cemetery (Kunze-Götte, E. -Tancke, K. - Vierneisel, K., Kerameikos VII, 2, München 1999). 49 On the Duchess see Trompeo, P.P., Nell'Italia romantica suite orme di Stendhal, Roma 1924, 306-307.
