Medici Vase

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.

At 1.52 meters high, with an everted gadroon-shaped lip, it has a deep frieze carved with a mythological bas-relief that successfully defies secure identification: a half-draped female figure Iphigenia seated beneath a statue of a goddess in a high plinth, restored as Diana, with heroic warriors on either side, perhaps Agamemnon and Achilles or Odysseus standing on either side. Two fluted handle handles rise from the satyrs' heads on either side of the carved acanthus-leaf base, and stand on an extended gadrooned base on a low square plinth.

The vase reappeared in the 1598 inventory of the Villa Medici, Rome, but its origin is unknown. Transferred from the villa in 1780, it has since been displayed in the Uffizi Gallery, today in the first floor Arone Verull sull'Arno overlooking the River Arno. It was often illustrated in engravings, the most famous of which is by Stefano della Bella (1656); he depicted the young Medici heir who would become Grand Duke Cosimo III seated, drawing the vase.

Often paired as garden ornaments since the late 17th century with the similar Borghese Vase, they are two of the most admired and influential vases of antiquity. The place of the Medici vase in the Western canon of Greek and Roman remains can be gauged by its prominent position in the composite views or capricchie that were a specialty of the Roman painter Giovanni Paolo Panini, to choose the outstanding example. Angelica Kauffman painted the second Lord Berwick in his Grand Tour sitting next to the vase.

Many "copies", sometimes quite loose, were made to decorate palaces or their gardens. The Medici vase 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 in the Borghese Vase.