The Story of the Francois Vase

270 figures run, fight, and dance across the surface of the François Vase. While the decoration seems dense and busy to our modern eyes, an ancient viewer would have known all of these mythological stories from oral tradition and epic poetry and could identify each figure with the help of the 121 labels that accompany them. Let’s take a close look at scenes on the vase to better understand how it was used as a functional story book in the ancient world.

An Italian named Alessandro François found hundreds of fragments of the vase that now carries his name while excavating an ancient Etruscan tomb in Italy in the mid-1800s. Though found in Italy, the François Vase was made around 570 B.C.E. in Athens, Greece. In antiquity many Athenian vases were exported to Etruria, a region in Italy where consumers were eager to acquire Greek products.

We know the names of the people who made the François Vase because they signed the vessel twice: Kleitias as painter, and Ergotimos as potter. This pair of artists collaborated on at least two other vessels that survive in fragments. The unconventional shape of the François Vase and its elaborate, well-planned decoration suggest that Kleitias and Ergotimos were an innovative team.

The François Vase is a volute krater (a vessel used for mixing water and wine with curling handles) and is likely one of the earliest vases of its type made in Athens.[1] The shape of its handles and its particularly large size create more space for painted decoration, which Kleitias, the painter, took advantage of. Kleitias used the black-figure painting style, which was popular among Athenian artists in the Archaic period. His work is dense but careful, and his attention to labelling figures and objects made his decoration even more legible to its original viewers. The neat labels of Greek text that accompany and identify many of the characters on the vase still help us understand its imagery today.

The François Vase is decorated in registers (horizontal bands of decoration sometimes referred to as a frieze). The main register appears at the center of the vase. It is the tallest register, and is one of only two, to show a single uninterrupted narrative around the vase’s entire circumference (the other is on the foot of the vase). This register shows the marriage of the hero Peleus to the nymph Thetis, a celebrated event attended by the Greek gods. This popular myth appears on several other vases painted in the early Archaic period, including a bowl made by Sophilos.