This enormous jar stands about 108 centimeters tall, close to three and a half feet. It was made in Athens in the second quarter of the 7th century BCE, in the style called Proto-Attic, when Athenian painters were leaving behind the abstract patterns of the Geometric period and learning from the animals and monsters on imported goods from the Near East. The painter is anonymous. Scholars call him the New York Nessos Painter, a name borrowed from the centaur on his vases.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes the main scene as one of the earliest pictures of a Greek myth. Herakles strides forward with a sword and seizes the centaur Nessos by the hair. Nessos had tried to abduct Herakles' wife Deianeira, and he pleads with outstretched hands. Behind the hero a four-horse chariot waits with its driver. Higher up, a lion attacks a deer on the neck of the vase, and horses graze on the shoulder. Rosettes, spirals and swirling patterns fill the gaps.
Vases this large were made to stand over graves, and this one served as a grave marker. Across the surface you can still see the lines where the jar was pieced back together from fragments, which gives it a history of its own: first a monument, then a ruin, then a reassembled treasure.
The Nessos Painter's amphora appears on our: