Maenads tearing Pentheus to pieces Fresco House of the Vettii 62-79 CE This fresco comes from the east wall of room n, which may have served as a triclinium, a dining room. It is part of a program of mythological panels, which includes one on the south wall showing the punishment of Dirce and a […]

Red-Figure Calyx-Krater Near the Policoro Painter ca. 400 BCE South Italian, Lucanian (H: 50.5 cm) The remarkable scene on the front of this vase relates to the famous tragedy Medea, written by Euripides and first produced in Athens in 431 BC. Framed in the center by a halo (recalling her sun god grandfather Helios), the […]

Margaret Garner by Thomas Satterwhite Noble Oil on canvas 1867 (H: 50.8 x 40.6 cm) In 1867 the American artist Thomas Satterwhite Noble (1835-1907) portrayed a notorious incident in the history of American slavery-the discovery of the fugitive slave Margaret Garner in Cincinnati in 1856, moments after she had murdered one of her children and […]