Bell-Krater with Nike and a Running Woman

In 1651 the Jesuit college in Rome, the Collegio Romano, received a gift of antiquities, and the German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher built a museum around it. Under his care it became one of the famous collections of 17th-century Europe, a mix of ancient objects, machines and curiosities, and over the next two centuries it kept absorbing pieces whose findspots nobody wrote down. This wine-mixing bowl is one of them.

When a ministerial order split the Kircher museum up in 1913, its Etruscan and related antiquities came to the Villa Giulia, and the bowl still stands with them in the rooms of the Kircherian collection.

It was painted in Athens around 450 BC by the Achilles Painter. On one side Nike, the winged goddess of victory, flies with a torch above a running deer and looks back over her shoulder. On the other a woman runs and looks back too. The bowl had already been broken and mended in antiquity, with small holes drilled for metal clamps.