Suicide of Ajax Vase
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Suicide of Ajax Vase by the Black-Figure master Exekias depicts the suicide of Ajax is a neck amphora, painted in the black-figure style. It is now in the Château-musée de Boulogne-sur-Mer in France. The painter, Exekias, made this work in Athens at the end of the Archaic Period, around 540-530 BCE. The scene shows Ajax preparing for his suicide. Ajax appears in the middle, bent over his sword which he is placing in the ground. There is a tree to one side of him and his suit of armor (with his helmet facing the scene and a gorgoneion on his shield, looking out at the viewer) to the other side. There is a line of geometric decoration at the top of the scene and at the bottom of the amphora.
It was suggested by Jeffrey Hurwit that the tree is an example of "pathetic fallacy,"[1] though this idea was strongly contested by John Madden.[2]
While Exekias' version of the Suicide of Ajax is particularly well known, other examples of this scene, by other vase painters, also survive. These include a red-figure scene in a kylix (wine cup) attributed to the Brygos Painter (ca. 490 BCE) in the Getty Museum and a red-figure scene on an Etruscan calyx-krater (ca. 400-350 BCE) now in the British Museum.