The Wykehamist
hydria, which is currently in the British Museum. Apart from a few slight details( Eros being replaced by a woman, and the height of the vase on the right being just under a centimetre smaller), the vases are practically identical. The borders below are both 3 meanders followed by a chequer-square, and lips of the vases are decorated equally similarly. The necks of the vases are both ringed by black on red egg and dart patterns, although the British Museum’ s vase is marginally more detailed. The seats, the bundles of cloth and the lavers are also all positioned similarly, but the embroidered cap, taenia and fillet hung on the walls behind( from left to right), aren’ t present on the first vase.
However, the contention really begins to arise when considering the subjects of the vases, especially surrounding the identity of the woman on the left. She, quite noticeably, isn’ t wearing her clothes, but instead stands about to wash them: the artist specialised in scenes of women washing themselves or their clothes, hence his name— The Washing Painter. Female nudity was rare in Greek Art before the late 5th century BCE, and it wasn’ t until the 4th century BCE that a sculptor called Praxiteles carved the earliest known depiction of a nude Greek goddess, Aphrodite of Knidos, of which only fragments and copies remain— previously, nudity had been a heroic uniform assigned only to men as gods, warriors, and athletes. Even then, when women were shown as naked, it was generally in situations of violence to emphasise their vulnerability, such as in this hydria depiction
Troy, is begging Ajax, a famous Greek general, to stop, as Achilles’ son Neoptolemus has killed her brother Astyanax and is about to kill her father Priam. Her nakedness emphasises how helpless she and the other Trojan women are, and how they’ re about to lose everything, including the clothes off their backs, to the Greeks.
So, to return to our own Treasury’ s hydria: some historians have argued that the nudity of the women indicates that she is a ἑταιρα( hetaira), a relatively high-class form of Hellenistic courtesan. Marina Fischer theorises in her article that thigh amulets like the one worn by this woman were used in‘ a branch of aggressive erotic magic’ and mark out their wearers as prostitutes: this is significant as most nude figures shown by the Washing Painter wear similar amulets. Yet to imply that all his subjects were prostitutes would seem improbable, despite it being interesting to note that this figure
attributed to Kleophrades, which is on display in Berlin, depicting the sack of Troy. Here, Cassandra, one of the Princesses of here on the right( on yet another of the Washing Painter’ s vases) is a man, suggesting that male prostitution could have been equally as common as that of women.
However, the more PC interpretation of this woman and her bundle clothes is that she may be preparing for her wedding. This would fit neatly into the trend of the Washing Painter’ s other vases, since, as Sian Lewis writes,‘ Sabetai [ an Athenian researcher on Classical Archeology ] has examined the hydriai of the Washing Painter, which include several scenes of game-playing along with dance and washing [ which serve as ] … love oracles, played to find out when or whom a
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