Antique Lekythos (replica)

Precious fragrance oil in precious flacon

von Matthias Recke

The shape of this clay vessel with its characteristic opening is called a lekythos and was produced in ancient Greece during the 6th and 5th centuries BC as a perfume bottle. Its colour and painting with incisions are characteristic of the so-called Attic vases, i.e. vessels made in Athens. Even though ancient vases are often broken due to their great age and the fact that they were found in the ground, this vessel only fell in modern times. The gluing of the sherds has been done in a decidedly unprofessional way; large gaps are open and remnants of the glue are visible. A professional (and actually reversible) restoration would try to keep the traces of this process as invisible as possible.

Matthias Recke is the custodian of the Antiquities Collection and the Skulpturensaal at the Goethe University. This text was written in June 2023 for a pop-up exhibition within the conference "Sticky Films". The conference was organised by members of the PhD program Configurations of Film, and took Sara Ahmed's notion of 'stickiness' as a point of departure to discuss histories, theories and technologies of film-making.