Professor Amy Smith "Redressing Aphrodite on Sir William Hamilton’s Meidias hydria"

In anticipation of the Meidias hydria’s first return to Athens since its unspecified journey to Etruscan shores in antiquity, Professor Smith reevaluates the message of the Meidias hydria, with a focus on its central figure, Aphrodite in the Gardens. Stripping away the cultural expectations that post-Classical cultures have showered on this vessel, lenses through which connoisseurs and other culture experts have viewed it as an exemplum of Greek art, she contextualises this very Athenian Aphrodite in her late 5th-century context to understand her relevance to the attendants and mythic figures that surround her on this illustrious vase painting, to the vessel itself, and therefore to persons who may have encountered this vessel in antiquity.