A Krater with a Repainted Zone and a Provenance Gap

Fix the potter's hand first: shape, the joining of handle-plate to body, the torse and profile of the foot, and the palmette complex at the handles constrain date and workshop before any figure style is discussed. Then work outward from the parts least damaged and least rewarding to forge: the meander and saltire squares beneath the figures, the reserved band, the quality of relief line and the use of dilute glaze, and the drawing of ear, ankle and drapery hem. Refuse three kinds of evidence. Refuse the repainted zone, in either direction - it can neither support nor exclude an attribution. Refuse the kalos inscription, which is partially painted and therefore of contested date. Refuse the subject: both workshops paint the same Heraklean and sympotic subjects within a decade, so iconography narrows the field not at all. Publish a hedged attribution if that is what the evidence gives - 'near the Berlin Painter' or 'manner of the Kleophrades Painter' is professionally respectable; a name attached to a damaged vase is a claim the next scholar will test. State the limits in the entry: two diagnostic areas are lost to the join and the repaint.

Treat them as two separate problems with two separate documents. The provenance: 'in a private collection in Basel since 1978' is a claim, not a provenance, and the letter and photograph do not constitute documentation. Under a 1970 policy line the museum should not acquire title; for a loan, the entry must say exactly what is documented and what is not, and the object should be published in a standard open database so that a claimant or a source country can find it. Silence would make the museum complicit in laundering the gap. The repaint: it is a modern intervention and therefore evidence in its own right - it may conceal a loss, a join, or an added inscription. Document it before any treatment, in raking light and under UV, with a description of the fluorescence difference and a note of any visible brushwork. Above all, keep the repainted zone out of the iconographic argument: a scene reconstructed across it is a hypothesis about the restorer as much as about the painter. And publish the kalos inscription as partially incised, partially painted, without harmonising the two, because the painted portion may have been added to enhance the piece.

Start with imaging, which is cheap and non-contact: raking light and reflectance transformation imaging across the seam and the repainted zone to map the join and any incision under the paint; ultraviolet fluorescence to characterise the retouch already noted; infrared to see whether underdrawing or a different design lies beneath. Then elemental analysis by portable X-ray fluorescence on the added pigment and on secure ancient glaze nearby: titanium, zinc, chrome, barium or cadmium in the added area indicate a modern hand, while a composition consistent with the ancient palette removes one suspicion without proving authenticity. Use a binocular microscope for tool marks - ancient incision has a characteristic profile and modern incision often does not - and for adhesive residues along the seam. If the museum permits micro-sampling, analysis of the binder in the repainted area will separate an ancient repair from a nineteenth-century one. Publish all results alongside the object, including negative ones. And be explicit in the entry about what no test can settle: analysis can tell you that a zone is modern, never that the rest of the vase is ancient.