Thursday, November 20th

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”Hermes and the Journey Beyond: Family Memory in a New Funerary Painting from Ancient Apulia.”

Massimo Osanna, Director General of National Museums, Italian Ministry of Culture

In May 2023 the Carabinieri recovered an ancient mural painting from a London warehouse that had been illegally exported from Italy. Subsequent analyses suggest that this unique piece, datable to the third century BCE, likely decorated a tomb in Apulia, in southern Italy. The painting depicts a family gathering—a total of sixteen members, both female and male—in the presence of Hermes, the god who guides the deceased to the Underworld. Rendered in vibrant polychromy, the figures are individually identified by name through inscriptions in the local Daunian language and script.

This is the first time this exceptional piece will be presented outside of Italy. The talk will highlight its connections with coeval artistic trends both in Apulia and the wider Greek Mediterranean; it will discuss the results of the scientific analyses and the technical and conservation study carried out by the Istituto Centrale per il Restauro, focusing on the materials and pigments employed and on the painter’s working methods; and it will provide an interpretation of its iconography, contextualizing it within the social and cultural world of the ancient Daunians.

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Friday, November 21st

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“Figurative Art on the Daunian Stelae: An Embedded Visual Language”

Camilla Norman, Conservator, Powerhouse Museum

The statue-stelae of Early Iron Age Daunia are remarkable for their originality, complexity, and scope, especially so, having been produced in a society that appears to have limited political/social/religious structuring. The Daunians’ of this period had not yet adopted written language and otherwise seem to have had a modest output of figurative art. In this context, the imagery on the stele comes as a surprise. It is robust, internally coherent and sophisticated from the start, hinting at established artistic traditions in perishable materials for the region and the existence of a known canon. This paper explores that canon, outlining a) predominant, b) idiosyncratic and c) abstracted themes depicted on the stelae, their gendering, relationships, and hierarchies, and the implicit knowledge contemporary viewers must have had to appreciate their meaning. 

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“The Last Daunian Princeps: Funerary Painting and Romanization in Ancient Apulia”

Tiziana D’Angelo, Director, Parco Archeologico di Paestum e Velia; Director delegate, Palazzo Reale di Napoli

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“Entangled Statues: The Ugento Zeus”

Clemente Marconi, James R. McCredie Professor in the History of Greek Art and Archaeology; University Professor; Director, IFA and University of Milan Excavations at Selinunte

Discovered in 1961 in Ugento, a town in the province of Lecce and a former Messapian settlement, the bronze statue of Zeus—depicted striding forward, ready to hurl his thunderbolt while holding an eagle—is not only among the most significant examples of Late Archaic Greek bronze sculpture, but also the representative of a still largely unrecognized category of Greek statues produced for native or other non-Greek centers in Magna Graecia (southern Italy and Sicily). These works raise numerous questions concerning cross-cultural exchange and have been variously interpreted depending on scholars’ perspectives: at one extreme as evidence of a Greek presence in the non-Greek hinterland, at the other as war booty. Although our knowledge of the statue’s ancient context remains limited, what we know of Messapian culture in the sixth century BCE allows us to view the Ugento Zeus as a remarkable example of the process of selective adoption and adaptation of Greek art by Messapian communities, a process that did not lead to a “deculturation” of the natives.

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“Exhibiting an Exceptional Burial: New Insights in the Athlete’s Tomb in Taranto”

Stella Falzone, Director of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Taranto

The topic arises from new investigations (including those on the ancient genome conducted on the athlete’s skeletal remains, and those on the painted sarcophagus), with the aim of qualifying this exceptional burial dating back to the early 5th century, which is one of the most significant contexts in the permanent collection of the National Archaeological Museum of Taranto, with a view to a further enhancement.

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“Argonauts Go West:  An Iconographical Journey in Apulia and Etruria”

Martine Denoyelle, Senior Cultural Heritage Officer, Institut National de l’Histoire de l’Art

The epos of the Argonauts is present from the Archaic period in Greek pottery, in the form of isolated episodes such as Medea and the Pleiades or Jason fighting the dragon. Starting from the Classical period, the Argonauts begin to be depicted as a group, with several identifiable heroes or semigods, often accompanied by the prow of the Argo ship. It is in Magna Graecia that these episodes first appear, either on imported Attic vases (like the krater with the death of Talos) or on local productions (like the hydria with the capture of Amykos), along with revisited episodes like Phineus and the Harpyes on the Ruvo krater , which display the same heroes and the prow of Argo.  

It seems that an artistic culture surrounding the Argonauts’ expedition developed in this region and spread, notably to Etruria, where we find traces (such as the Ficoroni cista and the Argonauts’ crater in Florence) of a major artistic model common to all these Western artworks, model often attributed to Athens. This would be the famous fresco by Mikon described by Pausanias in the Anakeion. However, although studies have shown that the diversity of materials, forms, and locations where this iconography appears in the West suggests choices or even a re-functionalization of the myth made by different communities according to their needs, dependence on an Athenian model has not been completely ruled out. Yet, some certainties have gradually dissolved concerning the identity of the heroes depicted on certain vases, such as the Niobid crater, an Attic vase from Orvieto, or the “Argonauts” krater, a masterpiece by an Etruscan painter not very well known yet. By carefully reexamining these works, their style, and also, their technique, can we trace new connections between them and gain a clearer understanding of the journey of the Argonaut myth in the West?

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“Myth and History in Apulian Ceramics”

Claude Pouadoux, Independent Scholar

In the 4th century BC, Apulian art experienced a particularly flourishing period with the decorations and mythological repertoire of red-figure vases. One of the factors behind this revival was the association of episodes from mythology with historic scenes. With the Gigantomachy, the Amazonomachy, and the Trojan legend, the representations of the wars between the Greeks and Persians in the second half of the 4th century reveal the role of painting in putting more or less contemporary events into perspective and, more broadly, in reflecting on history. Does the transposition of themes characteristic of public spaces onto monumental vases not suggest that Taranto was seeking to appear as the new Athens? The emergence of current events in vase painting must be reviewed in the light of artistic practices in Taranto, but also of the political and social structure of the Daunian and Peucetian communities, for whom these prestigious vases offered powerful tools of distinction.

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“A Woman’s Shape? The Hydria in Italic Funerary Contexts”

Bice Peruzzi, Assistant Professor, Rutgers University

In lack of secure information about biological sex, archaeologists have traditionally used grave assemblages to distinguish “male” and “female” tombs. Yet, the increasing use of osteological analysis in Mediterranean archaeology in the last few decades has shown the pitfalls of this approach, demonstrating that many long held assumptions about gender representation in antiquity are based on false constructs, and there was much more variability than we had imagined.

This is particularly important for pre-Roman societies where the absence of emic information about how objects were used, paired with the presence of Greek vases in tombs has favored an hellenocentric reading of these objects. However, the study of the necropoleis of Central Apulia shows that communities were using Greek vases very differently from their Athenian contemporaries; this is illustrated, for example, by the presence of sympotic sets in female tombs, or of vessels traditionally connected with the “female sphere” (e.g., kalathoi, hydriai, lekanides) in male ones.

This paper analyzes the presence of hydriai in Central Apulian tombs dated to the 5th-4th century BCE, as means to investigate the relationship between the consumption of specific objects and the construction of identity in antiquity. This shape was relatively rare until the middle of the 4th century BCE, but it is often found in high expenditure tombs of adult men, even when the pots were decorated with genre scenes that featured multiple female characters. Furthermore, hydriai might have had a specific role in the funerary rituals, as they were often depicted on other vases as tomb offerings. Adopting a context-based approach, this study discusses how these vases were appropriated by the local populations and imbued of new meanings, to reflect the complex nexus of personal, social, and cultural identities that the deceased had maintained in life.

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“Out of Apulia: The Contents of the Scocchera Hypogea and their Dissemination Pathways”

Maya Muratov, Associate Research Curator for Provenance, Greek and Roman Galleries, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

In 1895, on the property of Savino Scocchera in Mandorleto-Grotticelle, east of Canosa, two hypogea, located within ten meters of each other, have been discovered accidentally. Although we possess somewhat incomplete records of the contents of the two tombs, it is believed that following the discovery, the majority of finds ended up in the house of Sig. Scocchera. However, within a couple of years, the Scocchera funerary goods were being passed on to the local dealers by the landowner, and eventually many of them ended up in private and public collections throughout Europe and the US. 

A recent (2024) acquisition by the Metropolitan Museum of Art of a head-vase from one of Scocchera’s hypogea (the so-called Tomb B), provides an opportunity to reconstruct and analyze the pathways of the objects’ dissemination. Through this exercise, one gains additional insight into the intricacies of antiquities trade in Italy in general and in Apulia in particular in the late 19 th -early 20 th  century. It also presents an occasion to follow up on the changing notion of the terminological constructs, such as “collection” and “archaeological collection,” and to discuss related museum display practices.