Attic Red-Figure Bilingual Cup Type A (Side A main view)

The running figure painted in the black-figure tondo of this cup has no distinguishing attributes to aid identification. He is nude, except for a mantle thrown over his left shoulder and right arm. Touches of added red, an old-fashioned motif used in black-figure and characteristic of Oltos, embellish alternate folds of the mantle, as well as sections of the man's hair and beard.



Both sides of the red-figure exterior are decorated with a pair of upright palmettes that frame a pair of eyes. Added red is used for the pupils, and the brows are rendered in red-figure. Between the eyes on side A, a youth walks to the left. He is entirely nude except for a purplish added-red wreath around his head. At the same point on side B is a stylized nose.



Bilingual vases began to be produced in Athens around 525 B.C. They combine the two primary Athenian vase-decoration techniques: the older technique of black-figure, and red-figure, the technique that would gain popularity and continue to be used through the fourth century B.C. On a black-figure vase, silhouettes in black gloss are contrasted against the red-orange clay of the vessel. On a red-figure vase, the forms come from the red-orange color of the clay, and the space around them is filled in with black gloss.  The vase-painter Oltos specialized in the decoration of bilingual and red-figure cups. His name is known from vases, and like most of his late bilingual eye-cups, the black-figure tondo on this cup bears the inscription, "Memnon is beautiful."