An Important Attic Red-figure Pelike Attributed to Hermonax Terracotta, Early Classical, ca. 470 B.C.E. H. 15 1/8 in. (38.4 cm.) With disk foot, convex handles, and torus mouth; side A: the Battle of Theseus and the Minotaur, the young Attic king advancing towards and grasping the horn of the Cretan bull-headed monster in his left hand, wielding a sword in the right, and wearing a short belted chiton and white wreath, his scabbard visible behind him, the Minotaur holding a rock in his right hand and bleeding form the wound inflicted under his right arm, the rock outcrop between them perhaps representing the labyrinthine landscape, a youth standing at left and observing the combat, a cloak draped over his left shoulder and arm, a lyre in his right hand, his hair falling in long ringlets over his shoulders and chest and surmounted by a white wreath, the advancing woman right offering Theseus a wreath and wearing a himation and long chiton with dotted borders, her hair bound in a leaf-ornamented fillet and flowing in long wavy locks down her shoulders; side B: four of the celebrants rescued by Theseus from the Minotaur, the two youths holding lyres clad in himations and wreaths, the two maidens wearing chitons, himations, and leaf-decorated fillets, one holding a wreath; a band of meander and cross-squares below the groundline, panels of lotuses and enclosed palmettes beneath a laurel wreath on the neck, vertical addorsed palmettes on the handles, the wreaths and blood of the Minotaur painted in white, the details of the musculature on the male figures and minotaur in dilute glaze. For the painter Hermonax, whose signature is preserved on ten known vases, see Richter, Attic Red-figure Vases, pp. 108-109, and Boardman, Athenian Red Figure Vases, the Archaic Period, pp. 193-194. He was a pupil of the Berlin Painter, and Richter wrote that, more than most of his contemporaries, he "preserved the freshness and sense of movement of the preceding age." The Nelson Bunker Hunt Collection, #12