Department Colloquium: Ann Blair Brownlee (Penn) “From Orvieto to Philadelphia: Attic Black-Figure Vases in the University of Pennsylvania Museum”

Speaker: Ann Blair Brownlee, Associate Curator Emerita, University of Pennsylvania Museum

Title:“From Orvieto to Philadelphia: Attic Black-Figure Vases in the University of Pennsylvania Museum”

Abstract: In the late 1890’s, the University of Pennsylvania Museum acquired a large collection of vases and fragments from excavations at the Etruscan city of Orvieto.  Those excavations, sponsored by the Museum with the financial assistance of Philadelphia department store founder, John Wanamaker, helped the new institution acquire scientifically excavated and documented material that could be legally exported.  The project was overseen by the Museum’s agent in Italy, Arthur L. Frothingham, who made an arrangement with Riccardo Mancini, a prominent local Orvieto landowner, who had been excavating on his own land for some twenty years. Extensive archival research in Philadelphia, Rome, and Florence has shown that the majority of the Museum’s most significant group of Attic black-figure pottery, including three vases by Exekias, comes from a single tomb that Mancini excavated in 1896 in Orvieto’s Croficisso del Tufo necropolis. In addition to establishing the original archaeological context of the Orvieto Attic black-figure vases, archival research has also recovered their complicated history after they arrived in Philadelphia, in hundreds of fragments, in 1898.  It took many years for the Museum to make  the material suitable for display and study, and that story, as well as the history of their exhibition in the Museum, unfolds in photographs, correspondence, and reports.