Bilingual Amphora of Andokides, with Heracles and Cerberus

This jar was made in Athens around 515 to 510 BC, but it was found in Italy, at Vulci, a city of the Etruscans, who bought Athenian painted pottery in great quantities and often buried it with their dead. Someone in its ancient life thought it worth mending. A hole low on the body once held a lead clamp, and the foot was repaired in antiquity. A mark scratched under the foot is listed in the Louvre's catalogue of Etruscan and Italic inscriptions.

The two sides are painted in two different techniques. On the red-figure side, attributed to the Andokides Painter, Heracles kneels with a chain and reaches towards Cerberus, the two-headed dog that guards the underworld, which he has come to carry off as the last of his labours. Athena stands behind him, and a Doric column marks the house of Hades. On the other side, in black-figure, Dionysus holds a wine cup among satyrs making music, with a woman who may be Ariadne, and the Louvre gives this side to the Lysippides Painter. The museum bought the vase in 1836.