AN ATTIC BLACK-FIGURED WHITE-GROUND LEKYTHOS, ATTRIBUTED TO THE ATHENA PAINTER , CIRCA 500-485 B.C.

with foot in two degrees, painted with Athena Promachos striding to left between a pair of confronted cocks and two bearded and wreathed hieropoioi (trainers at the Panathenaic games), each carrying a forked stick, one holding an olive branch, the goddess wearing a chiton, aegis, bracelet, and high-crested Attic helmet, her shield emblazoned with a serpent, each hieropoios wearing a loosely-draped himation, nonsensical inscriptions in the field, two rows of echeloned dots below the shoulder, linked palmettes on the shoulder, tongues below the neck, the details in added red.

reportedly found at Gela in Sicily
Jacob Hirsch, New York, 1933

Blue Book of the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, 1931-1942, pp. 60 and 121, Fig. a
C.H. Emilie Haspels, Attic Black-Figured Lekythoi, Paris, 1936, p. 256, Appendix XV, No. 34
Margarete Bieber, "Two Attic Black-Figured Lekythoi in Buffalo," American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 48/2, 1944, pp. 121-129, Fig. 2
Anne Dunman Ure, "Koes," Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 71, 1951, pl. XLII
John D. Beazley, Attic Black-Figure Vase Painters, Oxford, 1956, p. 522
Steven A. Nash, with Katy Kline, Charlotta Kotik and Emese Wood, Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Painting and Sculpture from Antiquity to 1942, New York, 1979, pp. 60-61 (illustrated)
Harvey A. Shapiro, Art and Cult under the Tyrants in Athens, Mainz, 1989, pl.15A (part)
Jenifer Neils, ed., Goddess and Polis: The Panathenaic Festival in Ancient Athens, Princeton, 1992, pp. 18 and 182, No. 55
Beazley Archive Pottery Database, No. 330737

Athena Promachos is one of the rightly-named Athena Painter’s favorite subjects on lekythoi, usually in the context of gigantomachies (e.g. CVA, Gela, Vol. 4, pl. 37, 1-3, and CVA, Norway, pl. 18,1-3), but sometimes shown by herself (G. Semeraro, En neusi. Ceramica greca e società nel Salento arcaico, Bari, 1997, Fig. 63). For a black-figured white-ground lekythos by the Athena Painter showing Hermes and three female deities, see Sotheby’s, New York, June 9, 2004, no. 11.