Loutrophoros of the Analatos Painter

Clay snakes crawl over this tall jar, modelled in the round and laid along the rim, the shoulder and the handles. On Athenian pots of this period snakes are generally read as a sign of the dead, and large vases like this one were often made for graves. It is a loutrophoros, 80 centimetres high, painted in Athens between about 700 and 680 BC.

On the neck, below a pair of winged sphinxes, men and women dance in couples holding branches, on either side of a woman playing the aulos, a double pipe. Around the body four two-horse chariots, each with a driver holding the reins, move in procession. The people are drawn as solid dark silhouettes, while the details of the horses are scratched into the paint. The vase has been glued back together from fragments, with gaps in the neck and body. The Louvre bought it in 1935.