Vase about Trojan war

This vase was named after the Dutch stadtholder Willem IV. He was given the vase out of the estate of Frederic count De Thoms, an 18th-century romantic adventurer. In 1844 the vase came into the possession of the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden. This red-figure amphora features a refined painting. The red-figure technique was developed around 530 B.C. Before that time vases were black-figured, the painting being done in black-colouring clay on a red background.
With this new technique it was the opposite: the space outside the outlined decoration was done in black, leaving the figures red. Thus it became possible to add certain refinements with a brush. The figures become more flexible and their clothes are rendered inmore detail. Black-figure pottery usually features stiff figures in silhouette. In red-figure pottery they are turned towards the beholder and sometimes done in three quarters, possessing more depth.
On the front of the vase we see a picture of the combat between Achilles (left) and Memnon (right) during the Trojan war. The scene is described in Homer’s Iliad. Above the scene, the heroes’mothers are watching the combat, while the god Hermes is weighing the souls on a pair of scales, which tip the wrong way for Memnon. Memnon’s mother rushes off in a panic. Hermes was the god who accompanied the shades of the dead to the underworld.