APC Image: AK 1124: Inv. # AP 1085. Well M; painted pinax. Made of coarse clay of a brick red color, like that common in Attic roof tiles. The back is rough, but the decorated surface is smoothly finished. The top edge of the plaque is preserved above the man's head. The bearded figure to right is holding a lyre in his left hand. The nude parts are rendered with a thick dull paint of purplish red color; his hair, beard and eye, as well as his tunic and the lyre are painted brown. This shade of brown seems to be the basic color of the figure, underlying all the other colors, as is shown in the case of the chin which appears clearly underneath the pointed beard. The contours and some details are made with deeply incised lines. For the face and hands as well as for the contours of the lyre single lines are employed, but the other contours are made with double lines, and the stripe between the two lines is painted brown. The eye consists of two concentric circles with small triangles added at the corners, and the eyebrows are rendered with double incised lines. In the case of the tunic, the double lines apparently indicate a border of the garment decorated with white dots. On the tunic are preserved two large rosettes consisting of a purple centre surrounded by smaller dots in white over a sizing of brown. The lyre, which is too small in proportion to the figure, consists of a single curved piece with bridge and crossbow for the attchment of the strings. The horns are decorated with double spirals, and on the body are two circles. The seven strings are indicated partly by double incised lines and brown paint, and partly by painted line without incisions. But the artist trying to show the man's hand behind the lyre got fingers and stripes somewhat confused, and this confusion is augmented by the appearance of the purple color on his hand. The string which held the plectrum hangs down from the bridge. At the right side are two hands of a second figure, represented in the act of taking the instrument or giving it to the bearded man. Both hands are painted purple, like that of the other figure, but the finger nails are brown. The identification of the bearded figure is rendered difficult by the fact that both he and the second figure are holding a lyre. One naturally thinks first of Apollo, who sometimes appears with a beard in early vase paintings; (for example on the Francois vase and on a Melian amphora). It may be, howerver, that the figure on the right is Apollo, and in that case the bearded figure might be Zeus or Hermes, but Broneer writes that he knows of no other instance of Apollo receiving the lyre from one of these or from someone else. It is possible that the figure to the left is the Centaur Cheiron teaching Achilles to play the lyre in the manner of the celebrated painting from Pompeii, but again parallels in archaic art are lacking. For the form of the lyre, the manner of holding it, and, above all, for the disproportionately small size of the instrument the Melian amphora, already referred to, offers the best parallel. In the use of color and in the style of decoration our fragment strongly resembles the painted metopes from Thermon. The head of the hunter on one of the metopes is remarkably like the head of the lyre player, but there is one fundamental difference. The incised lines on our fragment are particularly prominent, whereas the metopes rely entirely on color both for contours and details. Incised lines, to be sure, were used in metopes, but they seem to have served a purely technical end. They were used as outlines to guide the artist in painting the broad contour lines and in most places they have disappeared under the paint. Presumably the peculiar technique of double contour lines, so prominent on our fragment, owes its origin to this practice of scratching fine double lines on clay in order to assure an even contour line. Where the incisions are part of the decoration they were, of course, made after the figures had been painted. The difference is important also as indication of date. It is generally accepted that the metopes from Thermon were painted by Corinthian artists working in Aetolia, but the influence of Corinth on early Attic vase painting was sufficiently strong to account for the similarity between these metopes and the fragment in this photograph. Our plaque belongs to second half of the seventh century, when archaic Attic style was coming to independent existence. Thus parallels to our fragment can be seen among the early Attic vase painting. The closest parallel is offered by the Piraeus amphora in the National Museum in Athens (No. 353), where we find the same prominence of the incision with a slight tendency toward the double contour line, a comparable if not similar use of colors, the same awkward rendering of the finger nails on the closed hands, the shape of eyes and beard, and a general similarity in the drawing of the figures which shows that we are dealing with products of the same school and the same period. The Thermon metopes have been dated in the period between 650 and 620 BC., and our fragment probably belongs to a slightly later period. The prominent incised lines are an indication to that effect. This is further suggested by its close similarity to the Piraeus amphora, which likewise belongs to the period following that of the metopes. On the analogy of the metopes from Thermon one might be tempted to conclude that the fragment under discussion was part of a metope, but this is very unlikely. Two important features, the thinness of the slab and the absence of a frame are more appropriate in a dedicatory plaque. Unless it formed part of a continous frieze, such as has been suggested for the funeral plaques in Berlin, the most probaly explanation is that it was used as a separate dedicatory plaque like the painted pinax in the Acropolis museum, and the smaller pinakes from the Acropolis, Penteskouphi, and elsewhere. If so, it is one of the earliest known specimens of its type.