A boy with dark brown skin, standing at the left, holds out a black cup to a tall soldier in a long blue cloak, at the right. The boy holds a lance and supports the soldier's large oval shield against his chest. Almost all the preserved evidence for painting in the Hellenistic period comes from funerary monuments. Some like the vaulted tombs of Macedonia and Thrace show large scale figures and friezes. More modest painted stelai like the ones displayed here have been found in many places in the Eastern Meditereanean.
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Title:Painted limestone funerary slab with a soldier taking a kantharos from his attendant
Period:Hellenistic
Date:2nd half of 3rd century BCE
Culture:Greek
Medium:Limestone, paint
Dimensions:Other: 14 13/16 × 9 5/8 × 3 3/8 in. (37.6 × 24.4 × 8.6 cm) Other (Panel): 9 3/4 × 7 7/8 in. (24.8 × 20 cm)
Classification:Miscellaneous-Paintings
Credit Line:Gift of Darius Odgen Mills, 1904
Accession Number:04.17.6
Inscription: Painted inscription: “–attos, a Galatian”
Found in 1884 in a tomb in Alexandria, Egypt (near Ramleh)
1884, found in a tomb in Alexandria, Egypt; 1884, purchased by Elbert E. Farman, New York; after 1887, purchased by Darius Ogden Mills from Elbert E. Farman; until 1904, collection of Darius Ogden Mills; acquired in 1904, gift of D.O. Mills.
Merriam, Augustus C. 1885. "Inscribed Sepulchral Vases from Alexandria." American Journal of Archaeology and of the History of the Fine Arts, 1(1): p. 18 (general mention).
Merriam, Augustus C. 1887. "Painted Sepulchral Stelai from Alexandria." American Journal of Archaeology and of the History of the Fine Arts, 3(3/4): no. 1, pp. 263–64, pl. XVII.
Gillett, Charles R. 1898. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Egyptian Antiquities in Halls 3 and 4. no. 822, p. 56, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Reinach, A. J. 1910. "“Les Galates dans l’Art Alexandrin.”." Monuments et mémoires de la Fondation Eugène Piot, 18(1): no. 7, p. 53.
Pagenstecher, Rudolf. 1919. Nekropolis: Untersuchungen über Gestalt und Entwicklung der alexandrinischen Grabanlagen und ihrer Malereien. no. 46, pp. 51–2, Leipzig: Giesecke & Devrient.
Richter, Gisela M. A. 1927. Handbook of the Classical Collection. p. 192, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Richter, Gisela M. A. 1953. Handbook of the Greek Collection. p. 132, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Brown, Blanche R. 1957. Ptolemaic Paintings and Mosaics and the Alexandrian Style. pp. 17, 21, pl. VI, 1, Cambridge, Mass.
Cook, Brian. 1966. Inscribed Hadra Vases in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Papers of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Vol. 12. pp. 12, 16–8, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Marszal, John R. 2000. "Ubiquitous Barbarians. Representations of the Gauls at Pergamon and Elsewhere." From Pergamon to Sperlonga. Sculpture and Context, N.T. de Grummond and B.S. Ridgway, eds. p. 198, n. 34, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.
Casagrande-Kim, Roberta. 2014. When the Greeks Ruled Egypt: From Alexander to Cleopatra no. 122, p. 104, Princeton and Oxford: Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University.
Abramitis, De and Mark Benford Abbe. 2019. "A group of painted funerary monuments from Hellenistic Alexandria in the Metropolitan Museum of Art." Techne : Journal of Technology for Architecture and Environment, 48: pp. 60–71, figs. 1–10.
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The Museum's collection of Greek and Roman art comprises more than 30,000 works ranging in date from the Neolithic period to the time of the Roman emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity in A.D. 312.
