A Goat and a Composite Figure: Reading a Cypriot Free-Field Jug

On the shoulder of a small jug in the Drakopoulos collection, opposite the handle, two shapes stand on bare buff clay. At left is a wild goat in black silhouette, facing right, its long horns swept back over the spine and its eye left in reserve. At right rises a taller figure: a fan of feathery leaves above a hatched band, a ladder-like vertical stem, paired leaf shapes at its sides and base, and two comb-like pendants hanging from angled branches. When the jug was first published here in 2024, this article read the second figure as an abstract human with raised arms, hands of eight fingers and leaves for feet. A plant reading fits the painted elements at least as well, and we now think it fits them better. This article sets out why, and how specialists have argued over other figures on Cypriot free-field jugs that refuse to declare what they are.

The jug and its class

The jug is 22 cm tall and wheel-made, with a full ovoid body on a low ring base, a short wide neck and a broad pinched mouth, chipped at the front. It is painted in matt black alone: a band at the base of the neck, a small circle with a central dot on the lip beside the handle, and the two motifs on the shoulder. Black on a light ground with no red makes it White Painted IV. Einar Gjerstad found that this ware shares its clay and slip with Bichrome IV, and that the two are told apart by the red [1]. Both belong to Cypro-Archaic I, c. 750 to 600 BC.

The earlier version of this article called the wide mouth and short neck unusual. They are the standard form. At Salamis, Anna Georgiadou and Maria Dikomitou-Eliadou describe the free-field jug as 20 to 30 cm high, with "a short neck and a large, pinched mouth" [2, p. 343]. The jug was in the Henry Sandon collection in the United Kingdom by the 1980s and was sold at Chorley's in 2023. Where it was found is unknown.

What the free field held

Gjerstad coined the term "free-field style" in 1948 for a layout. On a pinched-mouth jug left bare between its bands, "on the free surface of the vase a single ornament is applied" [1]. At first the ornament was geometric. By Bichrome IV the free field took "both geometrical and pictorial designs" [1], and among the subjects of his Eastern style Gjerstad listed "lotus buds and flowers, rosettes, sacred tree, aquatic birds, quadrupeds, and human figures" [1]. Karageorghis defined the pictorial free-field vase as one "produced in either the White Painted or the Bichrome technique" [3, introduction to cat. 149-161]. An earlier version of this article said that on red-slipped wares the free-field figures were painted in white; we know of no evidence for it.

Birds dominate the repertoire. Alicia Dissinger, cataloguing Cypro-Archaic vases painted with birds, counted the other figures that share the field with a bird: humans on 24 vessels, fish on 10, goats on 6 [9]. Human figures exist on these jugs, then, but they are a minority, and Georgiadou and Dikomitou-Eliadou find figured jugs of any kind far fewer at Salamis than jugs with abstract geometric decoration [2, p. 343].

Figures that are certainly human

The human figures that no one disputes all have parts that can be named. On a Bichrome IV jug in the Metropolitan Museum (74.51.509), two human figures, two birds, a central lotus and smaller lotus flowers are laid out "strictly symmetrical"; a second jug is so close that Karageorghis gave both to one painter and one workshop [3, cat. 157]. In the Cyprus Museum, a Bichrome jug of unknown provenance (B1949) carries an archer moving to the right and "shooting at a stag which stands before a plant", with a bull before a flower behind him [8, no. 300]. Dissinger describes a fragmentary Bichrome IV jug on which two humans with bird-like heads, each topped by a crest, hunt birds; one holds a bird by the neck in one hand and an axe in the other [9].

Even the certain figures can carry uncertain readings. A White Painted IV jug in the Metropolitan Museum (74.51.532), 19.1 cm high and said to be from Ormidhia, shows a man holding spears and marching to the right. He is drawn entirely in silhouette, which the catalogue calls unusual [3, cat. 150]. Karageorghis read him as a Black African, from the form of the head and the solid black face [3, cat. 150][11]. On a figure painted wholly in black, the colour of the face cannot settle the question, and the reading rests on the shape of the head.

The crane and the Pygmy

The sharpest published argument over a free-field figure concerns a seventh-century Bichrome jug in the Cyprus Museum (1938/IX-8/1), 35 cm high. Opposite the handle a large stylised bird looks right at a small man with the head of a ram. He is shown from the front, which is rare in this painting, and his long arms hang awkwardly from the shoulders. Karageorghis was certain of his reading: "This is not just any bird and just any man." He identified a crane and a Pygmy, explained the ram's head by Hecataeus, who described the Pygmies as ram-shaped, and called the jug the earliest depiction of the myth, which does not appear in Greek vase painting before the François Vase of about 570 BC [7, no. 75].

Karageorghis and Jean des Gagniers had proposed the same story in their corpus of Cypriot figured pottery [5]. J. N. Coldstream, reviewing it, was not persuaded. He set the "impressively monumental birds" of the free-field jugs against "the miserable mannikins in many of the human scenes", and doubted "whether the absurd confrontation on the jug IX.9 really refers to the story of the Pygmies and Cranes" [6]. The corpus authors had themselves observed, in Coldstream's summary, that the human body "always caused insuperable difficulties to the Cypriot artist, as did the spatial relationship between one figure and another", so that Cypriot painting made no break into narrative of the Greek kind [6]. Both scholars describe the same painting. They divide over whether an awkward small figure beside a bird can carry a story at all.

Combs, nets and hands

The comb-like shapes on the Drakopoulos jug were the core of the human reading: they were taken for hands with eight fingers. Comb shapes have a literature of their own in Cypriot vase painting, and it points elsewhere. Dissinger notes that the comb motif has been taken for a textile, a woven object, a cage or a net, and Vicky Vlachou has argued that comb motifs in Cypriot vase painting represent cages or traps for birds [9][10]. On a Cypro-Geometric Bichrome I plate in the Louvre, Dissinger reads a bird standing above a comb motif, beside two humans with crested bird-like heads, as a bird about to be netted [9]. We do not suggest that the pendants on our jug are nets. In the published readings of comb shapes on Cypriot pots that we know of, they are objects, and none makes them hands.

A goat before a tree

Read as a plant, the figure's parts fall into place: the ladder is a trunk, the fan a crown of leaves, the paired leaves at the sides and base are fronds and shoots, and the comb-like pendants hang from branches. The human reading had to explain why the "elbows" bend the wrong way, why the "hands" point straight down, why the "feet" point up and why leaves grow from the "armpits". On a tree none of these needs explaining. The figure resembles the composite trees and lotus-trees of Cypriot vase painting, and Gjerstad counted the "sacred tree" among the subjects of the Eastern style [1].

A goat beside a tree is one of the oldest compositions in the art of the region. Lesley Bushnell calls two wild goats set antithetically about a tree "one of the longest lived and most widespread images of the Ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean", first seen in the mid-fourth millennium BC [4, pp. 65-66]. In Iron Age Cyprus it was revived on pottery: a White Painted footed bowl from Palaepaphos-Xylinos shows silhouetted goats with exaggerated horns feeding on a palm tree, and in the Cypro-Archaic the icon was "rendered in a highly stylised form on Bichrome IV ceramics", with stout goats nibbling at an elaborate lotus [4, p. 73]. Bushnell also traces wild goats, trees and stylised hills appearing separately in Cypriot pictorial pottery of the 11th century BC, a "pars pro toto or elemental icon" through which, she suggests, Cyprus may have kept the composition in memory [4, pp. 73-74].

The free field itself made room for a single animal before a single plant. The Cyprus Museum archer jug places its stag "before a plant" [8, no. 300], and another Bichrome jug in the same museum carries nothing but "a bird to the right before a stylised tree" [8, no. 301]. Read this way, the Drakopoulos jug shows a wild goat approaching a stylised tree, with one animal where the old icon usually has a heraldic pair. We know of no close parallel for the figure under either reading.

What the restored paint can and cannot tell us

The lower body of the jug is heavily pitted, and the damage falls on the decorated front (see the surface study). Parts of the painted figure were restored in 2023 and 2024, and several of its lines are crisper than the weathered surface around them. The line drawing in this article was traced from photographs of the jug as it is now, restoration included, so it records our reading of the painting and cannot serve as independent evidence for it. Details such as the number of "fingers" or the angle of the "arms" cannot carry an interpretation until the restored paint is separated from the original. Identifications of the figure as a deity or a ritual performer, which this article once entertained, have no support in the surviving evidence.

Where the human face is

On many free-field jugs the clearest human presence is the pot. At Salamis, Georgiadou and Dikomitou-Eliadou write, "the mouth is always decorated with eye motifs, arranged on each side of the pinched opening, with added eyebrows ... emphasising the anthropomorphic character of the vessel" [2, p. 343]. Turned to face its spout, such a jug looks back at whoever pours from it. The Drakopoulos jug has no eyes at the mouth, only one dotted circle on the lip beside the handle. Its painter gave the shoulder a goat and something that grows, and whether that something also has arms is a question for the original paint under the restoration.