On the outside beyond the eyes hoplites fight grimly across the handles.

An extraordinary design fills the bowl’s interior: at the center, Dionysos reclines on a sailing ship as grapevines laden with seven bunches miraculously sprout beside its mast, while seven dolphins swim in a coral-red sea around the boat. The vessel’s (now-much-restored) bold, large white sail is effective against the coral red, but not so Dionysos’s drinking horn painted in matt purplish added red.

The black-figured eye-cup, one of the most famous Athenian vases, is the earliest known use of coral red. The kylix (535 B. C.) is signed by Exekias as potter, which he painted as well as potted. Exekias was the greatest of black-figure artists, and he brought the style to its limits. It is hardly credible that so much human dignity and pathos can be expressed in so artificial a convention.

Exported from Athens in antiquity, this large cup with a diameter of 30.5 cm was found in an Etruscan tomb at Vulci.

Interior: Dionysos in a ship, sailing amongst dolphins. Dionysos reclines like a symposiast in his ship, holding a rhyton in his right hand and leaning back on his left arm. The white sail of the ship spreads above him, and climbing the mast of the ship, a grapevine with clusters of grapes fills the field of the cup. The prow of the ship is decorated with eyes; the body of the ship with two leaping dolphins and the stern post bends up into a swan’s head. Around the ship, seven dolphins jump and sport, surrounding Dionysos like maenads and satyrs. The field is painted in coral red, forming a seamless background encompassing both sea and sky which fills the whole interior of the cup rather than being confined to a central tondo. The composition is unusually well suited to the circular field of the vase.

Exterior: on both sides A and B, large apotropaic eyes like those on East Greek cups, with eyebrows and diminutive noses. Beneath and on either sides of the handles, battles over fallen heroes (fight for the body of Patroklos?). On one side the warrior has already been stripped of his armor; on the other, he is still armed.