small red figure kylix with Oedipus and the sphinx

The anonymous painter of the original red-figure kylix, dating to ca 470BC, is named The Oedipus Painter by art historians. It is in the Museo Gregoriano Etrusco in the Vatican Museums. Discovered in fragments at the ancient site of Vulci (an Etruscan city that imported high-end Athenian pottery), the image painted onto the tondo of this cup is the definitive template for how this aspect of the myth was depicted for centuries thereafter.

Oedipus sits on a rock on the left side, dressed as an ordinary traveller, wearing a cloak and a flat sun hat (the petasos - also worn by Hermes), resting his chin thoughtfully on his hand. The Sphinx sits directly opposite him, perched on top of an Ionic column, staring at him with an air of misplaced arrogance, while awaiting his answer.

On the exterior of the original piece is painted an unruly, chaotic Dionysiac revel - in stark contrast to the intense, quiet, intellectual scene on the interior.

The hybrid mythical enigmatic sphinx, with the face of a woman, the body of a lion and the wings of a bird of prey, has an interesting duality in ancient Greek art and literature.

The male sphinx of ancient Egypt, benevolent guardian of pharoahs and of sacred places, was integrated into archaic Greek culture, but with a significant difference, namely that she was now a female hybrid. The Greek sphinx retained - at first - the role of silent guardian, as seen in archaic pottery and in many apotropaic funerary markers, to watch over the dead, and to ward off evil. (If you have been to the museum in Delphi, you'll have seen the monumental sphinx dedicated by the people of Naxos to Apollo's panhellenic sanctuary.)

Gradually, during the archaic and the early Classical periods, there is a distinct shift in the representations of the sphinx in both Greek art and literature. Hesiod set the tone for this change by rewriting the sphinx' genealogy... she was now the offspring of terrifying, primeval Greek monsters Typhon and Echidna. Smaller sphinx statues were now placed on top of gravestones as boundary markers between the living and the dead, and the sphinx became intimately linked to mortal grief, death, and the terrifying transition to Hades. By the time Sophocles wrote Oedipus Tyrannos (ca 429 BCE), the silent stone guardian had been reimagined as a speaking, riddling, destructive devourer of any who failed to solve her cryptic riddle. The point at which, outwitted by Oedipus, this symbol of mystery and ruin hurls herself to death from a steep cliff, in some ways represents a transition from primeval chaos to civilised reason.

This pottery collection is produced in Greece in the workshop of the Lioulias family, with whom It's All Greek is proud to have been working since 2004.