Faliscan Red-Figure Skyphos with a Bathing Scene
Unknown · Classical period, c. 360-350 BC
A large two handled drinking cup, a skyphos, painted in the red-figure technique. On the front a group is at the bath: a naked woman bends over a louterion, a basin on a stand, next to a naked man washing himself, while to the right another woman with her hair in a bun stands on a stone tying her sandal, a partridge at her feet. Above, a satyr leans out of an opening, stretching his arms towards the scene, and a half draped man holds out a wreath. On the back two draped men flank a figure who may be Apollo, wreathed and wrapped in a himation, while a naked youth reclines playing a trumpet.
The cup was made at Falerii, the Faliscan city north of Rome now called Civita Castellana, whose painters adapted the Athenian red-figure style in the fourth century BC with their own taste for lively, slightly irreverent scenes. Parts of the lower body and of the back were lost and have been filled. It came to the Louvre with the vast collection of the Marchese Campana, bought in eighteen sixty one and allotted to the museum the following year.
Did You Know? A satyr pokes his head and shoulders out of an opening in the top of the scene, as if peeping at the bathers from a window.
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