![]() ![]() The true provenance of the krater wasn't exactly a surprise. Next year the Met is sending it back to Italy for good. When the museum debuts its lavish new Greek and Roman galleries next month, its most notable antiquity will be left in a side gallery. It was stolen-dug up by looters from an Etruscan tomb near Rome and smuggled out of Italy just months before it was sold, an inconvenient truth the Met finally copped to last year. Thomas Hoving, then the Met's director, was so smitten by its classic beauty he called it "positively the finest work of art I've ever seen." (Take that, Michelangelo.) But the 2,500-year-old krater did have one major flaw. The krater-a 12-gallon pot for mixing wine and water-was one of only two dozen surviving examples by the great painter Euphronios, and it even had his signature. Working in the new red-figure technique - which enabled them to depict the body in red hues, as opposed to the black paint that predominated early on - they displayed a new sensitivity to human anatomy and a keen interest in creating a sense of depth in their paintings.In 1972, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art paid a record-smashing $1 million for an ancient Greek vase known as the Euphronios Krater. ![]() Scholars refer to Euphronios and his collaborators as "the Pioneers," a group of potters and painters regarded as among the first self-styled artistic schools in Western history. The krater is named for its painter, Euphronios, an Athenian artist who worked at a time of great change. So as the Met experiences its own Classical revival, the magnificent krater is saying goodbye (albeit quietly) to the city it has called home for the past 35 years. As a result, the krater will leave New York for good this January. ![]() Paul Getty Museum last week to agree to return 40 of its antiquities. The krater's sense of exclusion is justified: It was caught up in the same kind of cultural property dispute with the Italian government that led the J. Once used for the mixing of water and wine at symposia, it sits somewhat anonymously in a side room, peering like a forgotten child onto the new Classical Galleries down the hall. that has long been one of the Metropolitan Museum's prized possessions. There is an air of melancholy surrounding the Euphronios Krater, an imposing ceramic vessel made in Greece in the sixth century B.C. ![]()
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