A Magnificent Attic Red-Figure Krater from the Polygnotos Workshop

The loan and the agreement with the Republic of Italy

On December 6, 2023, a spectacular volute-krater was installed in the Greek and Roman galleries of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. This was not the krater’s first sea voyage. About 2,440 years ago it left Athens, where it was made, for the Etruscan city of Spina, an ancient harbor with an ethnically mixed population on Italy’s northern Adriatic coast. The Greek masterpiece was discovered in 1923, during the excavations of the city’s necropolis, in Valle Trebba, in one of the richest and most complex graves: Tomb 128. The site yielded thousands of imported Attic vases, including this remarkable example, as well as local wares and bronzes. The grave goods attest to local funerary practices, such as burying the dead with banquet sets, but also to the close relations between Etruscan Spina and Athenian culture. The discoveries at Spina also played a crucial role in the development of scholarship dedicated to Greek vases; many of the finds were studied by Sir John Beazley, a British scholar who contributed greatly to the discipline during the twentieth century. Today, the finds from Spina are displayed in the National Archaeological Museum of Ferrara.

The four-year loan of the krater is part of an ongoing exchange of antiquities between the Republic of Italy and The Met. An agreement in 2006 stipulated the transfer of title and return of several artworks, including the famous Euphronios krater, dated around 515 BCE. The agreement also provides for rotating long-term loans of comparably great works of ancient art from the Republic of Italy: the present loan from Ferrara follows one from the National Archaeological Museum in Florence. Per the agreement terms, a replica of the krater was created using the techniques of ancient Athenian potters and will remain on display at Ferrara for the duration of the loan. This allows Ferrara visitors to appreciate the significant archaeological context as well as the narrative integrity of the grave goods from Tomb 128.

The ancient city of Spina: Archaeological discoveries

The accidental discovery of Spina in the early 1920s during reclamation work in the Po Delta lagoon near the modern city of Comacchio, in Emilia Romagna, would resolve a centuries-old series of hypotheses regarding the identification of the city.

Classical Greek and Latin authors focus on Spina’s origins, describing the city’s prosperity, the result of its commercial activities and its power on the seas. The sources locate the city on a branch of the Po River, providing in some cases very precise indications of its exact position.

The port was probably founded around 540 BCE, in the course of the Etruscan territorial reorganization of the Po Valley. This initiative was intended to manage the economy of the large area centered around the city of Felsina (today Bologna), which had long been the driving force of the region’s commercial system. The new settlement, created in the Po Delta, exploited the river and its access to the Adriatic Sea as vectors for trade. Spina also benefited from the extraordinary agricultural and trading resources of the Po’s inland plains, which extended Spina’s commercial access to Etruria’s western regions on the Tyrrhenian Sea. The new city thus became a cultural link between central Europe and the Mediterranean Sea.

The early excavation campaigns (1922–24) in Valle Trebba, directed by the archaeologist Augusto Negrioli, brought to light 327 tombs, which Negrioli immediately identified as belonging to Spina’s necropolis. The continuing archaeological investigations, under the direction of Salvatore Aurigemma, superintendent of antiquities of Emilia and Romagna, brought the total number of recovered graves to 1,215 over a 346-acre area.

The second phase of the excavations took place after World War II, when reclamation of the Comacchio lagoons was carried out in the nearby Valle Pega. The new sector, under the direction of Professors Paolo Enrico Arias and Nereo Alfieri between 1954 and 1965, yielded 2,714 burials; Alfieri discovered a further 198 tombs at Valle Trebba between 1962 and 1965. The tombs contained hundreds of bronze utensils and vessels and thousands of Attic figured pottery vases, mostly red-figure, imported from Athens.

The excavations and the related research led, in the late 1950s, to the identification of the settlement’s location, not far from the necropolis in Valle del Mezzano, thanks also to the use of aerial photographs taken after the reclamation.

Gradually, the topography of the settlement at Spina became clear: it was located on either side of an extinct river branch (also detected with aerial photography), known as the Spinete and Spino in ancient sources and in medieval texts as the Padovetere and Padiverio. The archaeological investigation of the town started in 1965, continuing off and on until the early 1980s, then uninterruptedly from 2007 to 2017, under the direction of the Archaeological Superintendency of Emilia Romagna, in collaboration with the University of Milan and the University of Zurich.

Excavations, now under the aegis of the University of Bologna and the University of Ferrara, are presently underway in the area of Spina’s settlement, focused on revealing more about this complex and articulated settlement made of wooden structures on pilings, raised on islands in an area of lagoons.

The “National Archaeological Museum” of Ferrara, dedicated to Spina

The discovery of Spina led to the creation of the Royal Museum of Spina in Ferrara, today the National Archaeological Museum. The choice of Ferrara followed heated discussions about the best place—Comacchio, Bologna, or Ferrara—to conserve and exhibit the extremely important finds that had emerged from the Comacchio lagoons. The museum was inaugurated on October 20, 1935, in the sixteenth-century Palazzo Costabili, renovated to adapt the building to its new museal purpose.

Redesigned in 1970, the museum closed in the late 1980s for a complete restructuring, and reopened to the public in 1997. A series of further expansions resulted in the way the museum receives its visitors today. Spina’s archaeological legacy, a treasury of ancient history, is, in the words of Sir John Beazley, “the largest collection of Attic red-figure vases in the world.”

The Attic volute-krater from Tomb 128

The extraordinary artifact on loan to The Met, a large Attic red-figure volute-krater, found in Tomb 128 of the Spina/Valle Trebba necropolis, dates back to the late fifth century BCE. The main scene on this monumental vase depicts two enthroned divinities, amid a procession of men and women, younger and older, dancing and playing flutes, tambourines, and cymbals. Because the scene is virtually unique, its interpretation and the identification of the divine couple present singular difficulties, making the volute-krater from Tomb 128 one of the most famous and discussed vases in Athenian red-figure pottery.

This masterpiece of Classical art is attributed to the school of Polygnotos, a major Greek pottery workshop that operated in Athens during the time of the Parthenon’s construction: The temple’s sculpted decoration, devised by the great artist Phidias, stylistically inspired the potter Polygnotos and the members of his workshop. They elaborated what is called today the Grand Style in Attic red-figure pottery, characterized by monumental vases painted with tall figures.