Csornay Boldizsár - Dobos Zsuzsa - Varga Ágota - Zakariás János szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 99. (Budapest, 2003)

DÁGI, MARIANNA: 'Tinkers' and 'Patchers': Some Notes on the Ancient Repairs of Greek Vases

In some cases we can notice that the bronze pins were additionally cast in place by lead.

11 In cases when the mender was not able to join the original fragments of vases together, he used alien sherds for repairing. Following this method the fundamental principle was that the alien fragment should have fitted in size and shape to the vase with no or the least possible tooling.

12 The exterior design of the alien fragment often did not match the original decoration of the vase at all.

13 In the Collection of Greek and Roman Antiquities we find an example of this repairing method. A Campanian red-figure bell-krater painted by the Capua Painter was completed with a foot of a bell-krater from the Cumaean A workshop, at a distance of ca. 20 km from Capua. The techniques described above were applied not only in Antiquity. The conservators of 19

th-century Italy followed a method analogous to the Antique one, probably borrowing it from the local craftsmen.

14 And this leads to an important question: how can a distinction be made between Antique and post-Antique repairs? Examining the repaired vases of the J, Paul Getty Museum, M. Elston tried to give some starting points. In to her opinion, if a pin or a staple is preserved in the holes or channels, the presence of the corrosion is a good indicator of the repair's being Antique. However, when metal repairs are missing, the shape of the drill holes and residual incrustations can indicate the age of mending. The holes made by palm drills can be dated to ancient times, while the precisely cut holes are made by mechanical drills and therefore modern.

15 M. Elston suggests that the sunk drill holes provide evidence of mending in Antiquity, while the cylindrical holes are typical 10 The kylix by the Euaion Painter, J. Paul Getty Museum, inv. no. 86.AE.251: see Elston 1990, 55, figs. 5-6. The foot of a red-figure kylix dated around 460 BC from the Crocefisso del Tufo necropolis, near Orvieto, was fixed in a similar way. See Bizzarri 1962, 64, fig. 23/'A. 11 A bucchero kalyx and a Siana cup from the Crocefisso del Tufo necropolis provide good examples. See Bizzarri 1962, 87, fig. 23/B; 127, fig. 41/A. 12 See, e.g., the kylix signed by Douris in the J. Paul Getty Museum, the broken rim of which was completed with an alien fragment matching almost perfectly in arc (GettyMusJ 13 [1985] 169, no. 23, and Elston 1990, figs. 63-65, 25). The neck and the lip of the amphora attributed to the Bareiss Painter present the same method. In this case not only did the exterior arc of the alien fragment used for completion match perfectly, but the decoration was also carefully selected to match. Thus only the interior had to be filed to fit properly to the neck. See Moore, M.B. - von Bothmer, D., A]A 76 (1972) 1-11; on the repair: 9-11; on this detail: 9, pi. 6, fig. 21. 13 A well-known example is a Vatican stamnos completed with a fragment of a kylix painted by Douris. See Nogara, B., JHS 71 (1951) 129-132, fig. 3. It is easy to recognise the mending of an Eye cup in the J. Paul Getty Museum inv. no. 87.AE.22 too. In this case the missing part of the rim was substituted with a black-painted fragment, easily discernible. See Elston 1990, fig. 23. 14 Monaco, R. - Mussati, R., Storia del restaura di ceramiche terramaricole modenesi, in Archeológia dell'Emilia Romagna III, 1999, Florence 2001, 261-280. 15 Elston 1990, 58-59, figs. 11-12.