The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Ode on a Greek mixing-bowl
Henry Whorwood enjoys this study of an ancient masterpiece – and its long afterlife in Western art
S256pp, Head of Zeus, £18.99
arpedon is one of the lesser-known heroes from the Iliad, even though he’s the star of some of its best bits. The son of Zeus and Laodamia (daughter of Bellerophon, who rode Pegasus and slew the Chimera), Sarpedon was king of Lycia and fought for the Trojans, alongside his cousin Glaucus. It is with Glaucus that he shares one of the finer dialogues of the poem, in which Sarpedon explains why they fight:
Glaukos, why is it you and I are honoured with pride of place, the choice meats and the filled wine-cups in Lykia, and all men look on us as if we were immortals? […] It is our duty in the forefront of the Lykians to take our stand and bear our part of the blazing of battle, so that a man of the close-armoured Lykians may say of us, “Indeed these are no ignoble men who
Sarpedon’s other star turn is as Patroclus’s victim. Dressed in the armour of Achilles, Patroclus kills Sarpedon with his spear. Zeus, with children on both sides of the war, debates whether to let Sarpedon be killed. He does, but showers the Trojans with blood to show his grief.
Nigel Spivey’s new book focuses on the legacy of a single depiction of Sarpedon on a masterpiece of ancient pottery. It is part of Head of Zeus’s Landmark Library, a series in which each volume takes a work of art, institution, or monument as a jumping-off point to discuss a wider aspect of the history of civilisation (in the older-fashioned,
Kenneth Clark sense).
Other books include
Hadrian’s Wall, The
British Museum, and
Skyscraper.
Spivey, a Cambridge don and familiar face from television, is the right man to write this book, but I’m not sure he has the right audience – at least not all the time. Ostensibly this series is for those with a grounding in art history but nothing that should be called specialist knowledge. At times, Spivey ignores each of those criteria. Anyone picking up a book called The Sarpedon Krater may not need a three-paragraph plot summary of the Iliad, but they might need a bit more explanation about why Beazley and his method of connoisseurship has had such a profound impact on the study of Greek pottery. I also found Spivey’s habit of referring to himself as “the present author” off-putting, along with other offending items of academese: “we ought to consider whether ‘pity’ or ‘empathy’ are innate, transhistorical virtues.”
Still, Spivey takes us briskly through all aspects of the krater: its recent murky history (the man who sold it to the Met in New
York for over a million dollars in 1972 may have bought it from Giacomo Medici, an Italian dealer convicted of receiving looted artefacts); who made it and how; its likely use as a bowl in which to mix wine with water at a symposium; the meaning and legacy of its imagery. I think the chapter on the recent history of the vase might have excited me more if I’d been told the significance of the vase first, but beginning at the end is a classic device (if not a classical one).
The chapters on the legacy of the iconography of the vase are shakier. Spivey should have been more circumspect in his claim that the vase is the first instance of the are lords of Lykia, these kings of ours, who feed upon the fat sheep appointed and drink the exquisite sweet wine…” (Lattimore, 1951)
Renaissance trope of braccio della morte – the dead arm, hanging inertly. At every turn, he sees references being made to the vase by later artists, but these may be imaginary. The Renaissance artists who deployed the braccio della morte were more likely to have seen the motif in ancient representations of Meleager, particularly on sarcophagi, than of Sarpedon. Spivey must know this, but because of the book’s premise, that the Sarpedon krater is of decisive importance in the history of art, he is unable to say it directly.
None of this is to say that this beautifully illustrated book is not enjoyable. I was delighted to be reminded that “clue” derives from “clew”, meaning a ball of thread, as in the clue Theseus used to escape the labyrinth after killing the Minotaur. It’s just that I felt more like I had been taken on a tour of a good museum than led to a clear conclusion.
You will come away from this book knowing more about the Sarpedon krater and the civilisation that created it. You will also have learnt something about Renaissance and later art and its debt to classical civilisations. But you will also have more questions than when you started, and one of them might be: “Is the Sarpedon krater really as seminal as this book makes out?”
Zeus let his son Sarpedon die, but he showered the Trojans with blood in his grief Call 0844 871 1514 to order from the Telegraph for £16.99