Monday, June 22, 2015

The Amazon on the Cosmetics Case

This image, painted between 480 and 450 BCE, shows a mounted Amazon lassoing a Greek warrior. What particularly interested me about this work is the context:
“It is the only ancient artistic image of an Amazon using a lariat in battle,” Adrienne Mayor, a research scholar at Stanford University’s departments of classics and history of science, told Discovery News. . . . “ The vase would have held a Greek woman’s intimate make-up or jewelry. The images on the box suggest that women enjoyed scenes of Amazons getting the best of male Greek warriors,” Mayor said.
So, a bit of sexual subversion marketed to upper class Greek women.

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