Footnotes

Provenance:
Anonymous sale; Sotheby's, London, 29 January 1968, lot 154.
Walton family collection, Canada; acquired at the above sale and thence by descent to the present owner.
Beazley Archive no. 13519.

Published:
G. Ahlberg-Cornell, Herakles and the Sea-Monster in Attic Black-Figure Vase-Painting, Stockholm, 1984, p. 156, no. XI 17(A).

In an adventure outside of his Twelve Labours, Herakles made an expedition to Troy with Telamon and Oicles. The group found the city being ravaged by a sea monster Poseidon had sent in retribution for the Trojan king Laomedon failing to pay him and Apollo for their assistance in building Troy's famed walls. Herakles offered to kill the monster in return for a reward, such as the horses Laomedon had received from Zeus as compensation for the god's kidnapping of Ganymede. The king agreed, and Herakles bravely vanquished the monster by allowing himself to be swallowed by the beast and then killing it from within. Yet Laomedon was as untrustworthy as ever, and refused Herakles his payment. Heracles and his companions later sacked the city in response to this deception.

The iconographic motif of Herakles fighting with the sea monster appears on Greek vases from the second half of the 7th Century B.C. The sea monster, depicted with a human head and torso, a serpent body and a fish tail, is a Near Eastern motif that arrived in Greece in the Orientalising period. The attendants to the scene were originally the Nereids. In later examples, such as the present lot, it appears that the original identification of the Nereids was lost, substituted with generic figures of women or Maenads. Cf. a similar skyphos attributed to the CHC Group currently in the Louvre Museum, inv. no. F411, Beazley Archive no. 15530.