’Etruscanizing’ Athenian Painted Pottery

This latest installment of the Greek Painting in Context webinar series crosses the sea to Etruria, where thousands of Athenian figured vases traveled during the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E. Dr. Bundrick discusses the mobility of not only the vessels themselves but their meaning as they were transposed into Etruscan settings and transformed into Etruscan objects. She focuses on three vases from tombs at Tarquinia, Vulci, and Foiano della Chiana: an amphora, hydria, and column krater that represent three different moments in the Athenian ceramic industry and three dynamic examples of “etruscanization.” The shapes and especially the subject matter of these and other vases meshed with local funerary practice and belief, so that their selection and usage was anything but random. This trio of vessels also represents provenance research at work. All were found in the 19th century and their contexts documented at the time, but the information was lost as the pots were sold on the art market. Dr. Bundrick shares her rediscovery of the vases’ original findspots and explains how context is essential to our understanding of consumption.  

 

 

About the Speaker:

Sheramy Bundrick is Professor of Art History at the University of South Florida (St Petersburg campus), where she has been teaching since 2001. She earned her Ph.D. in art history at Emory University (1998) and has held fellowships and grants from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Samuel H. Kress Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, and the Archaeological Institute of America. During the 2013–14 academic year, she was a Rome Prize Fellow in Ancient Studies at the American Academy in Rome. Dr. Bundrick is the author of Athens, Etruria, and the Many Lives of Greek Figured Pottery (Wisconsin Studies in Classics, University of Wisconsin Press, 2019); Music and Image in Classical Athens (Cambridge University Press, 2005); and a variety of book chapters and journal articles, including two in the American School’s flagship journal, Hesperia (2008 and 2014). She is working on a book provisionally titled The Family of Citizens in Classical Athenian Art.