With the fourth volume dedicated to the Leipzig Antikenmuseum, the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum continues the publication of the Greek pottery held at this remarkable university collection. While its Italic wares still await treatment, the published volumes – the first two issued in socialist Eastern Germany, the subsequent ones after German unification – testify to the collection's troubled history as each of them refers to it under a different name. From ‘Leipzig, Archäologisches Institut der Karl-Marx-Universität’ (1959) via ‘Leipzig, Antikenmuseum der Karl-Marx-Universität’ (1973) and ‘Leipzig, Antikenmuseum der Universität’ (2006) to the present ‘Leipzig, Antikenmuseum’, the shifts in nomenclature document not only the political upheavals of the twentieth century but also the changing perception of university collections. Some seventy years ago, many were still seen as the semi-private fiefdoms of archaeology chairs; today they serve the public as museums and stress their inclusive openness as part of universities’ ‘third mission’.
To be fair, public and private sponsorship already played an important role in the years around 1900, when the bulk of the Leipzig pottery collection was assembled for teaching purposes. At that time, the need for support was indeed dire: with students being expected to develop first-hand connoisseurship of ancient material culture, universities – especially those without public collections nearby – increasingly saw the necessity to establish their own museums. This was the goal pursued by the collection's enterprising director Franz Studnicka in 1909; a helpful article by H.-P. Müller in the volume preceding the present one (CVA Leipzig 3, pp. 13–19) outlines Studnicka's successful acquisition policy and the overall history of the Leipzig collection.
In CVA Leipzig 3 P.-H. published the first part of the collection's Attic red-figured pottery; the volume under review contains the second part, and it has something of an odds-and-ends-feel about it as only about three dozen of the roughly 170 objects dealt with are (largely) complete vessels. The vast majority are sherds, and this goes to explain the unusually high quota of hitherto unpublished pieces (almost a third of the entries). Still, readers are presented with a wide range of material, allowing for fascinating, at times puzzling insights, and the emphasis on sherds is in itself typical for the period during which the collection was assembled. In a scholarly environment heavily preoccupied with Style with a capital S, small fragments of red-figure pottery could take on the same importance as an intact vase. Consequently, the contemporaries would term their sherd collections Stilproben, i.e. style samples.
Roughly a third of the pieces catalogued were acquired from Friedrich Hauser in 1897, another third was donated on several occasions (most of it in 1911) by Edward Perry Warren who, it is thought, was encouraged by Hauser to do so. Hauser and Warren knew each other well; they were part of the homosexual community of stranieri enjoying the liberties of belle époque Rome, and they both loomed large on the contemporary antiquarian market. This market being still awash with pottery fragments from the famed Campana collection dispersed in the years after 1858, it is no surprise that several of the fragments that ended up in Leipzig join with sherds today in Naples, Malibu and other collections.
Only reviewers read CVA volumes from cover to cover. This is a consultation work, and as with all publications of this kind its strengths lie to a large extent in technicalities. Beyond the complete bibliography, detailed description and the commentary each entry is provided with, the volume boasts additional information early editors of the series could but dream of: profile drawings have become a staple feature of the modern CVA, but for some uncommon shapes they are still not easily found, and it is thus most welcome to see them for pieces like the squat pelike, suppl. pl. 1.3, or the late calyx-crater, suppl. pl. 3. A particular strength are the nine indexes covering inventory numbers; findspots (not that many); provenances (this proves very useful); matching fragments in other collections; measurements, including volumetrics; technical features (from potters’ fingerprints to preparatory drawings documenting pentimenti); iconographic motifs and themes; inscriptions; and, finally, potters, painters and workshops.
The plates are of high quality throughout and excel even at the notoriously tricky task of making vase inscriptions readable. Clearly, the choice of details received some attention: pl. 9.5–6 provides a striking comparison between the heads on side A and B of a high-classical bell-krater; see also the beautiful detail of a Euphronian nereid's barrette (rather than fillet) on pl. 35.3. If a side note on photographic style be allowed: as is common practice today, the objects are presented against a virtual background with all physical surroundings erased digitally. This makes for the somewhat unsettling sight of the vessels seemingly suspended in mid-air; it also visually robs them of their physical presence in a tangible, three-dimensional space. Moreover, it underscores the manipulation the photo has been subjected to, thereby undermining its evidentiary function. While cropping photographs admittedly allows for clean, neutral settings, this reviewer is sure the sun of fashion will eventually set on this feature enabled by digital editing.
The entries, kept in a clear, unobtrusive language, are rich in the solid, often exhaustive kind of scholarship the CVA is renowned for. There are virtually no typos or factual errors, the owl facing right (not left) on pl. 75.7 being the exceptio probans regulam. The same goes for the bibliographies. Two items may be added for the sake of quibbling: elderly satyrs using two sticks to support themselves, as on pl. 29.2–3 (the satyr, incidentally, sports a kynodesmē), have recently been dealt with by R. Krumeich (in: N. Almazova et al. [edd.], Charaktēr aretas [2015], pp. 145–6). Sirens on lekythoi, as exemplified by the charming specimen on pl. 62.2–5, have been put into a wider iconographic context (A. Heinemann, in: S. Schmidt and J.H. Oakley [edd.], Hermeneutik der Bilder [2009], pp. 168–9). The very obscureness of such details goes to show the overall abundance of bibliographic material covered by the author.
CVA entries are supposed to provide readers with the material and visual evidence and its contextual understanding; they are no venue for bold flights of iconographic interpretation, and indeed P.-H. will not have any of it. Nevertheless, some objects present readers with rather challenging images calling for further investigation. The following is to highlight a few such instances, without necessarily answering the questions they pose:
– The girl stooping towards a chest on the lost lekythos, p. 85 fig. 24, recalls analogous images of boys approaching wine jugs on small choes (G. van Hoorn, Choes and Anthesteria [1951], figs 210–11). Girls relate to chests and weddings as boys to wine and symposia.
– The tentative reading given for the wrestlers (?) on fragment pl. 10.6 is not satisfactory; the taller one (hands bound above the head?) appears to wear a garment that would rule out an athletic context. Admittedly, I am unable to come up with any plausible alternative.
– The bell-krater, pls 26–7, shows Eos between two youths donning the respective attributes of her lovers Kephalos and Tithonos, hunting gear and lyre. She runs after Kephalos; is this a choice for manly hunting customs as opposed to soft musical practice? The Athenian vs Trojan descent of the two youths is not spelled out iconographically, but may be at play, too.
– P.-H. is reluctant to name the divine couple on fragment pl. 29.5. However, it seems difficult not to identify the bare-breasted woman as Aphrodite, the more so as her sinuous leaning posture calls to mind the near-contemporary statuary type of Aphrodite ἐν Κήποις and its variants. As the staff held by the beardless man she leans on features a branch-like offshoot, one would think of either Apollo's laurel or Dionysos’ thyrsos. The question cannot be decided, but given the man's short hair one would rather tend towards Apollo.
– The bell-krater pls 30–1 presents viewers with a tumultuous procession of torchbearers with a sacrificial bull. The woman present in this scene perhaps deserves some further comment, the more so as she appears to control the unruly animal through effortlessly holding it by the horns. I have argued elsewhere (in: B. Kowalzig and P. Wilson [edd.], Dithyramb in context [2013], pp. 302–4) for women in similar scenes to be interpreted as charites accompanying the sacrifice.
– The Kerch-style bell-krater pl. 32 shows a late instance of an old theme, a satyr pursuing a maenad. A telling detail is the himation the satyr has wound around his left arm and hand, covering the latter completely. This specific posture is in accordance with civic dress codes of the fourth century bce as shown, for example, by contemporary honorary statues; in the context of this scene it further stresses the pursuit's rather restrained mood rightly pointed out by the author.
– The satyr lifting his little son off the ground on the fragmentary chous pl. 56.3 and suppl. pl. 19.1 is not just displaying tenderness; the act of picking up a newborn son is part of the latter's acceptance through his father and marks the beginning of the baby's social life. Thus, we see a satyr family engaging in a fundamental ritual of the oikos.
– The pyxis pl. 65–6: is it Attic?
By way of conclusion, a remark on the management and financing of scholarship is in order. CVA Leipzig 4 is one of nineteen impressive volumes of the German subseries of the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum to be published over the last ten years. By comparison, the last British CVA volume appeared in 2010. It seems reasonable to suppose that one reason for this gap is the funding awarded to authors; the Bavarian Academy as financing body for the German part of the project remunerates work on a CVA volume with the equivalent of a fully paid two-year university contract per volume, whereas scholars working on the Great Britain subseries may at best receive a low four-digit allowance to cover their travel expenses. Perhaps the British Academy would want to rethink their policy and grant the United Kingdom's pottery collections the visibility and scholarly attention they deserve.
That said, this fourth Leipzig CVA volume has had a complicated publication history with a previous author dropping out of the project. P.-H. is all the more to be applauded for taking up the baton and bringing the full publication of this important collection's Attic material to a satisfying completion.
