In his new book, Professor Martin Robertson - author of A History of Greek Art (CUP 1975) and A Shorter History of Greek Art (CUP 1981) - draws together the results of a lifetime's study of Greek vase-painting, tracing the history of figure-drawing on Athenian pottery from the invention of the 'red-figure' technique in the later archaic period to the abandonment of figured vase-decoration two hundred years later. The book covers red-figure and also work produced over the same period in the same workshops in black-figure and other techniques, especially that of drawing in outline on a white ground. The book is intended as a companion volume to Sir John Beazley's The Development of Attic Black-figure (originally published in 1951 by California University Press), and as an examination and defence of Beazley's methods and achievements. This book is a major contribution to the history of Greek vase-painting and anyone seriously interested in the subject - whether scholar, student, curator, collector or amateur - will find it essential reading.

In this book, Professor Martin Robertson, author of A History of Greek Art (CUP 1975) and A Shorter History of Greek Art (CUP 1981), draws together the results of a lifetime's study of Greek vase-painting, tracing the history of figure-drawing on Athenian pottery from the invention of the "red-figure" technique in the later archaic period to the abandonment of figured vase-decoration two hundred years later. The book covers red-figure and also work produced over the same period in the same workshops in black-figure and other techniques, especially that of drawing in outline on a white ground. This book is a major contribution to the history of Greek vase-painting and anyone seriously interested in the subject--whether scholar, student, curator, collector or amateur--will find it essential reading.

Matheson provides the first comprehensive chronology for Polygnotos's own works, and then analyzes the distinctive, evolving Polygnotan style first isolated by Sir John Beazley, comparing this style to that of contemporary Athenian workshops and demonstrating its seminal influence on the later vase painting of southern Italy.

This richly illustrated book is a comprehensive study of visual humour in ancient Greece, emphasising works created in Athens and Boeotia.

How remarkable changes in ancient Greek pottery reveal the transformation of classical Greek culture Why did soldiers stop fighting, athletes stop competing, and lovers stop having graphic sex in classical Greek art? The scenes depicted on Athenian pottery of the mid-fifth century BC are very different from those of the late sixth century. Did Greek potters have a different world to see—or did they come to see the world differently? In this lavishly illustrated and engagingly written book, Robin Osborne argues that these remarkable changes are the best evidence for the shifting nature of classical Greek culture. Osborne examines the thousands of surviving Athenian red-figure pots painted between 520 and 440 BC and describes the changing depictions of soldiers and athletes, drinking parties and religious occasions, sexual relations, and scenes of daily life. He shows that it was not changes in each activity that determined how the world was shown, but changes in values and aesthetics. By demonstrating that changes in artistic style involve choices about what aspects of the world we decide to represent as well as how to represent them, this book rewrites the history of Greek art. By showing that Greeks came to see the world differently over the span of less than a century, it reassesses the history of classical Greece and of Athenian democracy. And by questioning whether art reflects or produces social and political change, it provokes a fresh examination of the role of images in an ever-evolving world.

In this study of Athenian vases of the late Archaic period, Neer tracks the design and imagery of the symposium, with its elaborate riddles and poems and the development of "naturalistic" techniques, such as foreshortening and shading. He also traces the birth of self-portraiture at the end of the sixth century and the treatment of overtly political subject-matter in the early democracy. The author thus reexamines basic ideas about Greek art and history, with particular regard to naturalism, realism, allegory, and the relation of ceramics to social life. Neer further demonstrates how formal ambiguity provided vase painters and their audiences with a means of creating new conceptions of civic identity.