The study departs from a technical examination of the panel painting Polyxena is Sacrificed in the Stockholm University Collection of Art, establishing the artistic process, level of ambition, and material choices by means of multispectral imaging techniques and elemental analysis. The artist, Jacob de Wet I, was both a well-reputed Haarlem-painter who specialized in small scale history paintings and headed a mass-producing workshop which supplied the low-end art markets of Haarlem and Amsterdam. The study places this artwork within the artist’s broad range of production. Further, the social and cultural contexts of the painting are investigated by comparing it to other artist’s versions of the subject, by means of an iconographical analysis of the image, and by examining its prominent theatrical features in relation to Dutch theatre traditions. By combining the technical, social, and cultural findings, the study aims to establish – and to delimit – a specific place in the art market and to suggest a possible type of customer for the painting. Confirming the work’s originality and authenticity, the results show an intuitive, thus likely time-consuming artistic process, a wide palette including expensive pigments – all indicative of a high level of ambition. In combination with the subject matter, these results suggest the painting to be a commissioned work. Further, the image and its social and cultural context, indicate the commissioner to be a person of some formal power within the Amsterdam society, seeking to communicate high erudition and to express liberal political views.  De Wet effectively expresses his message using a combination of painterly effects, including the materiality of the paint.

This thesis will look at the depiction of the Achilles and Troilos death myth on the Attic Black-Figure “Tyrrhenian” Group and its possible influence in Etruria from the mid 6th century BC to the Hellenistic period. The appearance of this Attic-made export ware in Etruscan sites of the 6th century BC, distribution of extant group pots with known provenance along with the emulation of the “Tyrrhenian” neck-amphora style and narrative frieze content in mid to late 6th century BC Etruscan pottery supports evidence for the popularity of the group amongst the Etruscan population. I will approach my investigation in Chapter Three by first giving an overview of the construction and decoration of the Attic-made “Tyrrhenian” Group and listing the variety of traits that characterize this group as being a true case of Athenian export product to Etruria. In Chapter Four I will focus on the appearance of the Achilles and Troilos myth on pots of the “Tyrrhenian” Group and trace the development of the myth’s iconography in Greek art starting in the mid 7th century BC. In Chapter Five I will focus on the appearance of the myth in Etruscan art in the mid 6th century BC and its subsequent development in Etruscan mythology through the analysis of Etruscan-made specimens. I will also attempt to give a reasoning behind the Etruscans’ adaptation of the Greek myth into their corpus. / Thesis (Master, Classics) -- Queen's University, 2009-09-22 13:27:11.548

The dissertation analyses the reliefs and paintings on thirty-one different tombs in Western Anatolia erected between 600 and 450 BC, in order to illuminate the ways in which non-Greek elites were identified on their memorials. The tombs from three areas are treated: Phrygia, Hellespontine Phrygia and Lydia, where the primary language groups were Phrygian, Mysian and Lydian. There is little literary evidence for these regions, and what there is tends to focus on political developments. Descriptions of people and society are few, and tend to represent them from an outside perspective, grouping them according to cultural characteristics which differentiate them from Greeks. It is clear, however, that the regions were important, prosperous places, controlled by illustrious grandees and land marked with a relatively high proportion of monumental tombs. Of these monumental tombs, there is a relatively high number decorated with striking and articulate images. There is much to be gained from examining the images on these tombs, as ‘indigenous’ sources for how elite Western Anatolians described themselves. Previous approaches to the tombs and their images have tended to look at them individually or in smaller groups, and to concentrate on the transmission and reception of Persian and Greek culture in the Achaemenid provinces. This dissertation contributes a broader comparative study of the decorated tombs, focussing on the kinds of statuses the images represent and the cultural forms these took. By comparing the various methods of self-representation, it clarifies patterns of identities in Western Anatolia and their relationship to historical circumstances. The dissertation is divided into five chapters. An introduction outlines the scope and sample, the historical background, previous studies of the monuments, the definition of ‘identity’ and the methods of analysis adopted here. Three case study chapters present the regions and the decorated monuments within them. A concluding chapter synthesises three aspects: social identities (roles and spheres of life represented); geographic and chronological patterns; and cultural affiliations and orientations. The dissertation concludes that a tension between Persian identities and local traditions is evident in some of the tomb images, which relates to the political upheavals in Western Anatolia and the Aegean at the time of the Persian Wars.