Marriage-scenes on red-figure pots are our richest source of information about the Classical Athenian wedding. This subject is one we sometimes find on pots for use by women (such as a pyxis or a lekanis) and, more rarely, on a pot - such as a kylix or an oinochoe or a krater - that looks as though it must have been used for a wedding ceremony because of the way it is decorated. The majority of wedding scenes, though, were painted on a loutrophoros or lebes gamikos, vessels specially associated with the marriage ceremony. What caught the vase-painters' interest here was ceremonies such as the adorning of the bride, the wedding-procession, or the bride's arrival at her new home. It is much easier to find pictures of these than of other stages of the wedding - the pledge, the sacrifices, the offerings to the gods, the bride bathing, the banquet, the dancing, the unveiling, or the epaulia. |
Most pictures of offerings being made are slightly hazy, since the main focus was the contact between the worshipper and the deity. We can tell that the sacrifice is part of the preliminaries to a wedding only if the figure in the picture is a girl of marriageable age holding her girdle (or one of her toys) and preparing to lay them before the statue of one of the gods connected with marriage.
Pictures of weddings are important documents. Very often they turn out to be our only source for marriage customs in Classical Athens and they help us interpret the literary evidence better. Even where the inspiration is in mythology, and the picture is not of everyday life but of the wedding of a hero or an Olympian god, it nevertheless reflects the customs and ideas of its time.
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