'Sappho' by Jeff Cane

Check out this fabulous 16" hand-made Charger Plate made by Jeff Cane for the upcoming Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition (Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples, May 3–October 4, 2009 - the same exhibition that has been in Washington DC until recently). Jeff specialises in applying historical images, documents and themes to platters, framed prints, art cards, candles, cement tiles and masonry crosses. You can read more about his work here.

The image on this plate is, of course, the so-called 'Sappho', found in May 1760 in a house of the Insula Occidentalis in Region VI. It was part of a Fourth Style decoration that paired it with the portrait of a man (all the fragments from this wall are about to go on display together in the Naples Museum when the rooms of frescoes reopen in April). The girl wears a golden hairnet and holds a stylus and wax tablet - references to the world of learning and culture. This is one of the most famous wall-paintings from Pompeii, an ideal portrait rather than a depiction of a real girl.

Jeff's Charger is signed and dated & comes with a Sappho poem. I want one!