Since the production of plays was prodigious in fifth-century Athens, it is significant that contemporary Attic vase-painters did not base their representations on the plays. Not until the following century in South Italy are there depictions of scenes taking place on actual stages. Complicating the scholar’s task in finding pictures to fit tragedies is the scarcity of representations of stage settings for subjects drawn from tragedy. Most such scenes are comic, and, even in those cases, they generally lack secure attribution to specific plays. Only one vase {No. 6), a fragmentary Sicilian calyx-krater, has been related to an extant tragedy {plate 7.3). The participants stand on a wooden platform supported by beams, whose edges can be seen just below the floor. Though without inscriptions, it preserves enough of its figures for an identification as Oedipus and his family, when they learn the news that he has married his mother, the subject of Oedipus the King by Sophocles. The figures are elaborately dressed and have quite expressive faces that resemble caricatures. On the left, a whitehaired messenger stares directly out at the viewer, as he gives his message to Oedipus. His daughters stand on either side of him with Jocasta, his wife and mother, on the right. Behind her a female attendant completes the scene, which takes place in front of four columns. Yet neither Ismene nor Antigone was present in this scene in Sophocles’ play.
There are three possibilities: {1) the painter has conflated two scenes; {2) he depicts a different play; or {3) he shows his own or some other version of the story. We do not have enough information to decide. What may be most interesting about this vase, however, is the lack of action on the part of the figures in contrast to what is normally seen on South Italian vases with scenes drawn from myth. The figures really do appear like a cast delivering and receiving lines. The messenger faces us the viewers, while the two adults stand still listening. In short, since the depiction of the stage definitely indicates a play, some scenes rely on the theater. The question then becomes whether the pictorial scene depends on the artist’s memory of an actual performance or on his reading of a text.
Plate 7.3 Oedipus. Sicilian calyx-krater by the Capodarso Painter. ca. 350-325 bce. Syracuse, Museo Archeologico Regionale ‘‘Paolo Orsi’’ 66557, from Syracuse, Necropoli dell’ Ospedale Civile. Photograph © Museo Archeologico.
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