Red-figure Amphora
- 103
Greek Vase-Painting in Midwestern Collections, Art Institute of Chicago, December 22, 1979-February 24, 1980.
On this vase is one of the earliest known representations of a secret ballot. After the Greek hero Achilles died at Troy, a dispute arose over who should receive his armour—crafty Odysseus or mighty Ajax. There were different myths about how the issue was resolved.
In this version the Greek warriors wrote their votes on olive leaves and dropped them into a shallow cup held by the goddess Athena. Odysseus won; Ajax committed suicide.
With Jacob Hirsch, by 1930;
Purchased from Hirsch by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1930.
The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Handbook of the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1933), 119.
John Beazley, Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942), 164, no. 1.
John Beazley, Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 249, no. 1.
Louise Berge, “90. Attic Red-Figure with Cover,” in Greek Vase-Painting in Midwestern Collections, ed. Warren Moon, exh. cat. (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1979), 155-57.
H. A. Shapiro, “The Judgment of Arms on an Amphora in Kansas City,” Bulletin Antieke Beschaving 56 (1981): 149-51.
Gloria Pinney and Richard Hamilton, “Secret Ballot,” American Journal of Archaeology 86 (1982): 581-84.
Roger Ward and Patricia J. Fidler, eds., The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collection (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1993), 116.
Ingrid Krauskopf, “Septem,” in Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, vol. 7, pt. 1 (Zurich: Artemis Verlag, 1994), 743.
Jenifer Neils, “The Cleveland Painter,” Cleveland Studies in the History of Art 1 (1996): 26n5.
Jenifer Neils, “Hera, Paestum, and the Cleveland Painter,” in Greek Vases: Images, Contexts and Controversies, ed. Clemente Marconi (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 82.
Deborah Emont Scott, ed., The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collection, 7th ed. (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2008), 11, fig. 26.
Robert Cohon with Karin Jones, “Ancient Greek Ceramics,” in Ceramics: Highlights from the Collection of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2016), 59, (repro.).
Edwin Carawan, "Deciding the 'Judgment of Arms,'" Classical Journal (Johns Hopkins University Press) 118, no. 2 (Spring 2023): (repro.).
Julian Zugazagoitia and Laura Spencer. Director's Highlights: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Celebrating 90 Years, ed. Kaitlyn Bunch (The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024), 17, (repro.).
