Polygnotos And Vase Painting In Classical Athens

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.

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.

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.

This study explores the phenomenon of 'spectators' at the sides of Athenian narrative vase paintings.

The four centuries between the composition of the Homeric epics and the conquests of Alexander the Great witnessed an immensely creative period in Greek art, one full of experimentation and innovation. But time has taken its toll; damaged statues have lost their colour and wall paintings have been totally destroyed. And yet sympathetic study of surviving sculpture and of drawing on vases can give extraordinary insight into and appreciation of these once brilliant works This book, designed originally for students, introduces the reader to Greek sculpture and vase painting in the critical period from the eighth to the fourth centuries BC. The works discussed are generously illustrated and lucidly analysed to give a vivid picture of the splendor of Greek art. The up-dated second edition includes a new chapter examining art in Greek society, a timeline to help relate artistic development to historical events, an explanation of how dates BC are arrived at, a brief overview of Greek temple plans and a further reading list of recent books. This clear, approachable and rigorous introduction makes the beauty of Greek art more readily accessible and comprehensible, balancing description with interpretation and illustration, and is an invaluable tool to help develop insight, appreciation and comprehension.

The potter and painter Myson founded the Mannerist workshop at the end of the sixth century BC. The Mannerists were his pupils and pupils of his pupils, and specialized in columnkraters, hydriai, and pelikai. The workshop was unusually long-lived and was active through the whole of the fifthcentury and the first decade of the fourth.The style of painting and the choice of some subjects are curiously old-fashioned. A number of pictures show rare themes such as the Death of Prokris, Odysseus and Nausicaa, and Orestes in Delphi. Other paintings give an unusual twist to well-known stories. The Mannerists were influenced bytheatrical productions, extant wall paintings, and the works of other vase-painters.The workshop provides important clues for the chronology of Attic vase-painting, for example drawing reflecting Pheidias' Athena Parthenos, and Aeschylos' plays Sphinx, Eumenides, and Seven against Thebes.

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.

This handsome volume presents an innovative look at the imagery of libations, the most commonly depicted ritual in ancient Greece, and how it engaged viewers in religious performance. In a libation, liquid--water, wine, milk, oil, or honey--was poured from a vessel such as a jug or a bowl onto the ground, an altar, or another surface. Libations were made on occasions like banquets, sacrifices, oath-taking, departures to war, and visitations to tombs, and their iconography provides essential insight into religious and social life in 5th-century BC Athens. Scenes depicting the ritual often involved beholders directly--a statue's gaze might establish the onlooker as a fellow participant, or painted vases could draw parallels between human practices and acts of gods or heroes. Beautifully illustrated with a broad range of examples, including the Caryatids at the Acropolis, the Parthenon Frieze, Attic red-figure pottery, and funerary sculpture, this important book demonstrates the power of Greek art to transcend the boundaries between visual representation and everyday experience.