A detail of the vase. Credit: CC BY-SA 2.5/WikipediaThe Derveni Krater exhibited at the Archeological Museum of Thessaloniki is one of the most elaborate metal vessels from ancient Greece yet discovered.
Found in 1962 in an undisturbed Macedonian tomb of the late 4th century B.C. at Derveni, not far from Thessaloniki, the krater is a tour de force of highly sophisticated methods of bronze working.
Weighing 40 kg, it was made of bronze with a high tin content (15%), which endows it with a superb golden sheen without the use of any gold at all.
The elaborate vase. Credit: Michael Greenhalgh, CC BY-SA 2.5/WikipediaLarge bronze vessels with figural registers in relief, such as the Derveni krater, were extremely rare in ancient Greece.
The most significant reason for this may not have been technical, since large pieces of armor were decorated using precisely the same techniques at the same time. Rather, this rarity may reflect the high cost of labor-intensive work, says Jasper Gaunt, of the Emory University in Atlanta.
A detail in the vase. Credit: CC BY-SA 2.5, Wikipedia
The exact date and place of making are disputed. Most think it was made around 370 BC in Athens. Based on the dialectal forms used in the inscription, some commentators think it was fabricated in Thessaly at the time of the revolt of the Aleuadae, around 350 BC.
Others date it between 330 and 320 BC and credit it to bronzesmiths of the royal court of Alexander the Great.
The vase is composed of two leaves of metal which were hammered and then joined, although the handles and the volutes (scrolls) were cast and attached. The main alloy used gives it a golden color, but at various points, the decoration is worked with different metals as overlays or inlays of silver, copper, bronze and other base metals.
Snakes with copper and silver inlaid stripes frame the rising handles, wrapping their bodies around masks of underworld deities. On the shoulder sit four cast bronze figures: on one side a youthful Dionysos with an exhausted maenad, on the other a sleeping Silenos and a maenad handling a snake.
In the major repoussé frieze on the body a bearded hunter is associated with Dionysian figures.
Beryl Barr-Sharrar, Professor of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, wrote recently a book about Derveni Krater where the artifact is placed in its Macedonian archaeological context and in its art-historical context as a highly elaborated, early-4th-century version of a metal type known in Athens by about 470 B.C.
David Mitten of Harvard University said that her book “elevates this masterpiece of later classical Greek art to a status alongside those of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus and the Alexander Sarcophagus as the most important monuments of Greek art in the fourth century B.C.”