Csornay Boldizsár - Dobos Zsuzsa - Varga Ágota - Zakariás János szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 100. (Budapest, 2004)
SZILÁGYI, JÁNOS GYÖRGY: "La gigantesque horreur de l'ombre Herculéenne" Apulian Red-Figure Vases Decorated in Superposed Colours
mental motifs (i.e., the feature that characterises a group first and foremost); later, still in the above cited work, he allows that the vases belonging to the same class' might have been produced in different workshops, obviously considering the eventuality that somehow they might prove to be separable from each other. 16 At the same time, taking their relationship for granted, he does not provide any analysis on those common features that would be suited to verify this relationship: he restricts his description to recording sites, shapes and ornamental motifs - the style of painting is left unmentioned. His only factual argument against the separation of the two groups is of chronological nature: to refute Beazley, he refers to the fact that according to the latest research, no chronological gap is apparent between the two groups: both productions begun essentially at the same time. 17 At this point, the Budapest vase and the above mentioned cups that can be linked with it come into play. Beazley's classification of the Red Swan Group is thorough and complex in nature. 18 The cups concerned belong to the class of the above mentioned stemless, so-called 'delicate' cups: the sides of the majority of cups are decorated, both inside and out, mostly by horizontally arranged branches of laurel; in the tondo, included in a double-circle there is a water-fowl looking to the left - in rarer cases, it might also be substituted by some other animal, or even a simple floral or geometric pattern. There certainly is some connection between this type and the four cups displaying water-fowl in their tondos that have been linked above to the Budapest vase, but this by no means implies that they belong to the same group, even if the shape that had been present continuously in Greece and South Italy for more than a century is the same, and the iconographie motifs identical. Discounting the absence of laurel branches, which are almost invariably present in the vases of the Red Swan Group, there are two further arguments that substantiate the claim that they do not belong together. On the one hand, the birds on the vases of the Red Swan Group were painted for the large majority by some well-recognisable painters, none of whom can be identified with the masters who decorated the four tondos. On the other hand, there is a much graver argument of chronological nature. It is De Juliis's observation that the co-occurrence of the above mentioned peculiarities, characteristic of Beazley's Red Swan Group, 'which were regarded in the past as the distinctive features of a separate class' appear exclusively in the second half of the 4 th century. 19 Conversely, the four vases (or fragments), whose tondos were decorated by different hands, can be reliably dated to the last third of the 5 th and the first quarter of the 4 th century. Thus, De Juliis's main argument 20 concerning the inseparability of the Xenon and Red Swan Groups (which would not be decisive 16 De Juliis, op. cit. (n. 11), 142, 183. See his earlier opinion, published much later: in Studi in onore di E. Miro, Roma 2003, 241. 17 Ibid., 10. 18 EVP (n. 10), 223. 19 De Juliis, op. cit. (n. 11), 183. 20 Ibid., 11-12, n. 14.
