Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei (Budapest, 2008)
ANNUAL REPORT • A 2008. ÉV - MARIANNA DÁGI: Highlighted Works of Art: Chamber Exhibitions Organized by the Collection of Classical Antiquities
HIGHLIGHTED WORKS OF APvT: CHAMBER EXHIBITIONS ORGANIZED BY THE COLLECTION OF CLASSICAL ANTIQUITIES 2008 was the fifth anniversary of the series and an important year in its history, for three reasons. We were able to show —following our original intention —the results of the latest research and newly acquired or restored works of art; finally, and for the first time, we succeeded in displaying works of art on loan from a museum abroad. The spring exhibition (4 March - 25 May) centered on a unique fragmentary vase that has been in the Collection's holdings for the last fifty years. It dates to about 325-250, and can be reconstructed as a lekythos. Its importance lies in the plastic scene on the body, which represents a horseman hunting a wild boar according to a canon well-known in Greek art from the fifth century BC onwards. The rider is dressed in a tunic fastened above the knee and held together by straps. He wears hunting boots, and a cape floating at the two sides, and his left hand holds the bridle. Based on similar scenes, he must have been looking outward at the viewer, and held a hunting spear in his raised right hand. The boar runs in front of the galloping horse: the scene depicts the moment just before it dies. Interpretation is aided by the shape and function of the vase. Since lekythoi were used in funerary ritual, their imagery is also connected to this sphere. The mounted hunter and the boar refer to a familiar religious rite of passage. In ancient xMacedonia, successful participation in the boar hunt was a necessary condition for joining the symposion and becoming a member of the community of adult w r arriors. Its representation on a funerary vase or stele must have symbolized the fact that "the youth w r hose memory is preserved by the relief had passed from one form of being to another: from the community of the living to the more populous society of the dead". (For more about the vase see the study by János György Szilágyi in Bulletin du Musée Hongrois des Beaux-Arts 106-107 [2007], 51-60.) The work of art which formed the nucleus of the summer exhibition (3 June - 31 August) had only been recently acquired by the Collection of Classical Antiquities. A tall volute krater, more than halfa meter in height, of conventional shape but unique decoration, itw r as probably made between 320-280 in Canosa, one of the most significant pottery workshops of Apulia. Local vase-painting workshops boldly experimented with new methods of polychrome decoration in place of the traditional red figure style. The Budapest vase, wdth its white, red, blue, grey and pink painted decoration on a reddish-brown ground —together with a dozen similar pieces —can be considered a forerunner of the polychrome style that dominated the next phase of Canosan pottery. The main side of the krater, also highlighted by plastic Gorgoneia adorning the volutes, is decorated with a scene so far unparalleled in South Italian
