Medici Vase

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The Medici Vase is a monumental marble bell-shaped krater sculpted in Athens in the second half of the 1st century AD as a garden ornament for the Roman market. ^[1]

Standing 1.52 metres tall, with a gardooned everted lip, it has a deep frieze carved with a mythological bas-relief that successfully defies secure identification: a half-draped female figure Iphigenia? seated below a statue of a goddess on a high plinth, restored as Diana, with heropic warriors on either side, perhaps Agamemnon and either Achilles or Odysseus standing to either side. Two fluted loops handles rise from satyr's heads on either side of the acanthus-leaf carved base, and it stands on a speading gadrooned base on a low square plinth.

The vase reappeared in the 1598 inventory of the Villa Medici, Rome, but its origin is unknown. It is now displayed in the Uffizi Gallery, in the first floor Verone sull’Arno overlooking the River Arno.^[2] It was often illustrated in engravings, the most famous of which is by Stefano della Bella (1656).

Often paired as garden ornaments since the later seventeenth century with the similar Borghese Vase,^[3] they are two of the most admired and influential vases from antiquity. It remains a popular subject for imitation in bronze or porcelain, for example by Wedgwood. Material on the many later decorative versions of the pairing can be found at Borghese Vase.