FRANCESCA TRONCHIN: Hi, I am Francesca Tronchin.
And I'm going to be talking to you from the Getty Villa
in Southern California about a krater, that is to say,
a mixing vessel that comes from the Greek Archaic Period
with a scene of Odysseus, great hero,
escaping from the cave of Polyphemus.
BETH HARRIS: Can I just ask what would have been mixed in here?
FRANCESCA TRONCHIN: Mm.
It's a good question, and fortunately an easy one
to answer.
BETH HARRIS: Phew.
FRANCESCA TRONCHIN: The Greeks would always
mix their wine with water.
It sounds kind of strange to us, but Greek wine
was evidently very dense and heavy.
Some wines could even be mixed with honey and spices and herbs
and things like that.
And according to the Greeks, only a barbarian
would drink his wine unmixed.
STEVEN ZUCKER: That would be us.
That would be us.
Maybe we should start off with a little bit about the story.
BETH HARRIS: It is a great story.
FRANCESCA TRONCHIN: This comes from The Odyssey of Homer,
the story of Odysseus, who was on the victorious side
of the Trojan War, one of the great Greek warriors
who survived the Trojan War.
And he wanted nothing more but to get back home
to Ithaca, an island off the coast of Greece.
BETH HARRIS: And his wife, Penelope--
FRANCESCA TRONCHIN: And his wife, Penelope--
FRANCESCA TRONCHIN AND BETH HARRIS: And his son Telemachus.
FRANCESCA TRONCHIN: Very good.
But Odysseus had a lot of difficulties
in finding his way home.
And according to Homer--
STEVEN ZUCKER: That's an understatement.
FRANCESCA TRONCHIN: According to Homer,
it took him about 10 years.
So what we have here is just one little snippet of a scene that
occurs after Odysseus and his men
have spent the night in the cave of Polyphemus,
a cyclops, a son of the god of the sea, Poseidon.
STEVEN ZUCKER: A cyclops is a giant
and known for having had one eye.
So the giant had actually trapped these men
in the cave with the intention--
BETH HARRIS: He was going to eat them, right?
STEVEN ZUCKER: He was going to eat them?
OK.
FRANCESCA TRONCHIN: And he did.
He did snack on a few.
Like a good barbarian, Polyphemus
drank his wine unmixed and got too drunk, and got very angry,
and started scooping up Odysseus's men
and eating them like peanuts.
Odysseus and the survivors developed a plan
to escape from the cave.
And since Polyphemus was already pretty drunk,
and he was passing out, Odysseus and his men
took a big, long tree trunk, put it in a fire,
and sharpened the end of it.
And Polyphemus passed out drunk.
They gouged his eye out with the stake.
STEVEN ZUCKER: Lovely.
BETH HARRIS: My Latin teacher loved to talk about that.
FRANCESCA TRONCHIN: As grisly as a story
it is, it's very indicative of a kind of Greek way of thinking.
You don't treat your house guests badly.
And that is precisely what Polyphemus had done.
And so they needed to escape, so they
blind Polyphemus with this giant stake.
Then the next step to sneaking out of the cave was Odysseus
and his men lashed themselves underneath the herd
of sheep and rams that Polyphemus had.
So as the sheep were walking out of the cave,
Polyphemus was patting the sheep on the back.
And he couldn't feel that the men were riding underneath.
STEVEN ZUCKER: Because he was standing guard
at the mouth of the cave.
BETH HARRIS: To make sure they didn't escape.
FRANCESCA TRONCHIN: Yes.
And as Odysseus and his men-- as they're leaving and about
to sail away, Polyphemus says, well,
the least you can do is tell me your name.
And Odysseus tells him in Greek, my name is nobody.
And so Polyphemus is very angry.
And he says, nobody has blinded me!
And nobody has stolen my sheep.
So the scene that we have here is really
just a little snapshot of that entire story.
But you have to remember that a Greek audience would
immediately recognize this.
One particular scene would be able to--
STEVEN ZUCKER: Reconstruct.
FRANCESCA TRONCHIN: --recount the entire story.
STEVEN ZUCKER: I think there's a little extra humor here,
because, of course, this is painted
on a vessel that's meant to serve wine.
Right?
And so it is wonderfully folded into itself, isn't it?
FRANCESCA TRONCHIN: Oh, absolutely.
And I think on a lot of Greek vases designed
for drinking wine there are all kinds of life lessons,
so to speak.
And this is one of them, of course.
By looking at this little snapshot
of the story of Odysseus, you remember Polyphemus,
and you remember not to drink too much.
STEVEN ZUCKER: OK, true.
Hopefully.
So how was this painted?
When we think about ceramics, we think about glazes.
And this looks very shiny in certain places.
But the Greeks didn't really have glazes in the way
that we understand them.
Isn't that right?
FRANCESCA TRONCHIN: No, that's absolutely right.
What the Greeks used for vase painting--
and we use that term painting rather loosely.
Because just the same that it wasn't really glaze,
it wasn't really paint, but in fact slip,
which is very watered-down clay.
And this gives us an insight into the tremendous difficulty
of vase painting.
Because after the potter has thrown the vase on a potter's
wheel, he might paint the vase himself.
Or he might pass it off to someone
who was exclusively a painter.
And in using that slip, that watered-down clay, and painting
on a clay vessel, it's almost like painting
on a black canvas with black paint.
It would have been very difficult to see
a lot of the areas that had been painted.
STEVEN ZUCKER: But now you can see them,
so what makes that visible?
FRANCESCA TRONCHIN: That happens through the magic
of firing clay.
STEVEN ZUCKER: And the amount of oxygen that gets into the kiln.
Isn't that right?
FRANCESCA TRONCHIN: Yes, the Greeks
very early on developed an excellent way
of firing their pots like this, and let air in and out
of the kiln at certain times in the firing process.
So that all of the areas that were unpainted
remained this clay-colored red, this terracotta reddish orange.
And all of those places that had been painted, touched
by the brush, they turned black through oxidation.
STEVEN ZUCKER: And then the artist has gone in,
and it seems like with a little stylus of some sort,
has actually etched into that black.
BETH HARRIS: Did that happen after the firing?
FRANCESCA TRONCHIN: Yes, that happened after the firing.
So these details that you see, for example,
of the arm of Odysseus coming around the side of the ram,
of the ropes that are tying Odysseus to the ram, the ram's
eye, as well-- those are all incised in with, like you said,
like a stylus.
Another technique that's been used here is added color.
There are big patches of white in those two big eyes that
are on either side of the vessel.
These eyes that have a very enigmatic meaning to us today--
I don't think anyone has quite worked
out exactly what those giant eyes mean.
And there's also added white along the belly of the ram
and for the ram's horns.
And that white was added after the firing process.
And that explains why a lot of it has flaked off.
STEVEN ZUCKER: I'm really interested in looking
at Odysseus's face, because here he is.
His men have been devoured, at least some of them.
He's really defying death by escaping, and yet, as a hero,
he looks so calm.
He looks so beautiful, and his face looks so determined.
FRANCESCA TRONCHIN: Well, I think this is a characteristic,
you could say, of Greek art from the archaic
and the classical period that the facial expressions,
for the most part, are really quite blank.
And there are some tremendously violent scenes.
For example, you can think of the pediment
at the Temple of Zeus at Olympia where centaurs are attacking
Greek women and men, yet everyone
has these perfectly placid facial expressions,
on the Parthenon--
STEVEN ZUCKER: It's so curious.
Why would they do that?
BETH HARRIS: Is it about transcending the earthly?
STEVEN ZUCKER: Or perhaps just the nobility of calm?
FRANCESCA TRONCHIN: Your guess is as good as mine.
BETH HARRIS: And this is an example
of black figure pottery.
FRANCESCA TRONCHIN: Yes, black figure,
which was the earliest form of painting
on vases like this one, where, really, you're
painting the positive areas.
You're painting the objects that you see-- the tree, the sheep,
and so forth, rather than red figure where
those details with the actual figures are reserved,
and the background is painted in.
STEVEN ZUCKER: So this is silhouette that a kind
of reserve [? line? ?]
FRANCESCA TRONCHIN: Yes.
STEVEN ZUCKER: Fantastic.
Terrific.
Thank you so much.
FRANCESCA TRONCHIN: Sure.