Bird-Catcher Cup

The picture fills the whole inside of this cup, with no frame or border. Two trees grow across the bowl, their branches full of leaves, birds and nests, with a grasshopper and a snake among them, and between the trees a bearded man in a loincloth is climbing. The traditional name, bird-catcher, reads him as a fowler after the nests. The Louvre is more careful. It describes the scene as perhaps agricultural, perhaps Dionysian, and the man as possibly the god Dionysus.

The cup is painted in the Ionian style, that of the Greek cities on the coast of what is now Turkey and the islands off it, and the Louvre suggests Clazomenae or Samos, each with a question mark. The fine inner lines are not scratched through the black as in Athenian black-figure, but only imitate that effect. Made around 550 BC, the cup was found in Etruria, in central Italy, where Etruscan buyers prized Greek pottery. It came to the Louvre with the Campana collection, bought in 1861.