Thin walls and careful, assured painting make the cup exquisite. The motif of paired figures flanking a central plant or floral form has a long tradition in art of the Near East and Greece before the sixth century BC, when this piece was made (see Amandry 1965); but several iconographic aspects of this example are unusual: the drawing style, notably with respect to the broad outlines and yellow and orange body colors; the naturalism of the plant, and its bower-like covering of the animal bodies; the ambiguous meaning of the curved dark-white-dark line between body and haunch – haunch contour or narrow tail (as the hooked end suggests; despite the existence of plausible deer tails behind the animals’ rumps).