Psykter with Lapiths Fighting Centaurs

For a few decades around 500 BC, Athenian hosts had a fashionable way of chilling their wine. A psykter, a jar shaped like a mushroom on a tall narrow foot, floated inside a large mixing bowl, one vessel holding the wine and the other cold water or snow. Which held which is still debated. Almost all known psykters date from about 520 to 480 BC, and then the shape went out of use.

Around this one runs the battle of the Lapiths, a people of Thessaly, against the centaurs. Among the fighters is the Lapith king Kaineus, whom no weapon could wound, so the centaurs drove him into the ground with rocks and tree trunks. The painter shows the fighting with unusual brutality.

The museum's first volume of vase publications, in 1925, gave the psykter to Onesimos, a leading cup painter of the time. In 1979 the archaeologist Stella Drougou, in her study of Athenian psykters, placed it instead near the Harrow Painter, and the question has stayed open. It was found in a chamber tomb in the Colonnette cemetery at Falerii.