Painted vases are the richest and most complex images that remain from ancient Greece. Over the past decades, a great deal has been written on ancient art that portrays myths and rituals. Less has been written on scenes of daily life, and what has been written has been tucked away in hard-to-find books and journals. A Guide to Scenes of Daily Life on Athenian Vases synthesizes this material and expands it: it is the first comprehensive volume to present visual representations of everything from pets and children's games to drunken revelry and funerary rituals. John H. Oakley's clear, accessible writing provides sound information with just the right amount of detail. Specialists of Greek art will welcome this book for its text and illustrations. This guide is an essential and much-needed reference for scholars and an ideal sourcebook for classics and art history.

Spirited Prospect: A Portable History of Western Art from the Paleolithic to the Modern Era is a lively, scholarly survey of the great artists, works, and movements that make up the history of Western art. Within the text, important questions are addressed: What is art, and who is an artist? What is the West, and what is the Canon? Is the Western Canon closed or exclusionary? Why is it more important than ever for individuals to engage and understand it? Readers are escorted on a concise, chronological tour of Western visual culture, beginning with the first art produced before written history. They learn about the great ancient cultures of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Italy; the advent of Christianity and its manifestations in Byzantine, Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque art; and the fragmentation of old traditions and the proliferation of new artistic choices that characterize the Enlightenment and the Modern Era. The revised second edition features improved formatting, juxtaposition, sizing, and spacing of images throughout. Spirited Prospect is an ideal textbook for introductory courses in the history of art, as well as courses in studio art and Western civilization at all levels.

Painted vases are the richest and most complex images that remain from ancient Greece. Over the past decades, a great deal has been written on ancient art that portrays myths and rituals. Less has been written on scenes of daily life, and what has been written has been tucked away in hard-to-find books and journals. A Guide to Scenes of Daily Life on Athenian Vases synthesizes this material and expands it: it is the first comprehensive volume to present visual representations of everything from pets and children's games to drunken revelry and funerary rituals. John H. Oakley's clear, accessible writing provides sound information with just the right amount of detail. Specialists of Greek art will welcome this book for its text and illustrations. This guide is an essential and much-needed reference for scholars and an ideal sourcebook for classics and art history.

The Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, one of the most important in Greece, houses masterpieces of Greek art associated with the history of Ancient Macedonia, from the 2nd millennium BC to the 4th century BC and the reigns of Philip II and Alexander the Great. The Guide to the Museum presents the rich, varied finds from Vergina, Sindos and Derveni and many other important Macedonian sites. Detailed illustrations accompany the descriptions of the objects on display. The introduction to Ancient Macedonia and the informative texts prefacing the descriptions of individual sections are designed to set the objects on display in their historical context, to help visitors to the Museum to enjoy the beauty of ancient art and follow the history of Macedonia.

Molly M. Lindner's new book examines the sculptural presentation of the Vestal Virgins, who, for more than eleven hundred years, dedicated their lives to the goddess Vesta, protector of the Roman state. Though supervised by a male priest, the Pontifex Maximus, they had privileges beyond those of most women; like Roman men, they dispensed favors and influence on behalf of their clients and relatives. The recovery of the Vestals' house, and statues of the priestesses, was an exciting moment in Roman archaeology. In 1883 Rodolfo Lanciani, Director of Antiquities for Rome, discovered the first Vestal statues. Newspapers were filled with details about the huge numbers of sculptures, inscriptions, jewelry, coins, and terracotta figures. Portraits of the Vestal Virgins, Priestesses of Ancient Rome investigates what images of long-dead women tell us about what was important to them. It addresses why portraits were made, and why their portraits - first set up in the late 1st or 2nd century CE - began to appear so much later than portraits of other nonimperial women and other Roman priestesses. The author sheds light on identifying a Vestal portrait among those of other priestesses, and considers why Vestal portraits do not copy each other's headdresses and hairstyles. Fourteen extensively illustrated chapters and a catalog of all known portraits help consider historical clues embedded in the hairstyles and facial features of the Vestals and other women of their day. What has appeared to be a mute collection of marble portraits has been given a voice through this book.

In this book, Gabriel Zuchtriegel explores and reconstructs the unwritten history of Classical Greece - the experience of nonelite colonial populations. Using postcolonial critical methods to analyze Greek settlements and their hinterlands of the fifth and fourth centuries BC, he reconstructs the social and economic structures in which exploitation, violence, and subjugation were implicit. He mines literary sources and inscriptions, as well as archaeological and data from excavations and field surveys, much of it published here for the first time, that offer new insights into the lives and status of nonelite populations in Greek colonies. Zuchtriegel demonstrates that Greece's colonial experience has far-reaching implications beyond the study of archaeology and ancient history. As reflected in foundational texts such as Plato's 'Laws' and Aristotle's 'Politics', the ideology that sustained Greek colonialism is still felt in many Western societies.

Staking out new territory in the history of art, this book presents a compelling argument for a lost link between the panel-painting tradition of Greek antiquity and Christian paintings of Byzantium and the Renaissance. While art historians place the origin of icons in the seventh century, Thomas F. Mathews finds strong evidence as early as the second century in the texts of Irenaeus and the Acts of John that describe private Christian worship. In closely studying an obscure set of sixty neglected panel paintings from Egypt in Roman times, the author explains how these paintings of the Egyptian gods offer the missing link in the long history of religious painting. Christian panel paintings and icons are for the first time placed in a continuum with the pagan paintings that preceded them, sharing elements of iconography, technology, and religious usages as votive offerings.Exciting discoveries punctuate the narrative: the technology of the triptych, enormously popular in Europe, traced by the authors to the construction of Egyptian portable shrines, such as the Isis and Serapis of the J. Paul Getty Museum; the discovery that the egg tempera painting medium, usually credited to Renaissance artistCimabue, has been identified in Egyptian panels a millennium earlier; and the reconstruction of a ring of icons on the chancel of Saint Sophia in Istanbul.This book will be a vital addition to the fields ofEgyptian, Greco-Roman, and late antique art history and, more generally, to the history of painting.

Much of the sculpture created in ancient Greece that has survived is funerary in nature. These markers commemorating the dead were traditionally placed along roads near the entrances to cities, where they could be seen by all. Although the monuments vary greatly in style, quality, and elaboration, they reach across the millennia speaking the universal language of human grief.
This illustrated catalogue presents fifty-nine Greek funerary monuments in the Antiquities collection of the Getty Museum. Spanning the Classical and Hellenistic periods, this collection offers new insight into Greek art and society that will be of interest to both scholars and the general public.

A World Perspective of Art History: Ancient Art History from the First Artists to the 14th Century - Volume One provides students with a worldwide, integrated introduction to art. The book features a distinct emphasis on women, minorities, and civilizations around the world using a coordinated time sequence and comparing art in multiple cultures simultaneously. Students discover art and culture from a global perspective and are encouraged to connect their own cultures with key learnings. The material is presented in historical time sequences based on the rise and fall of various civilizations and how they created art and architecture during that time. Students are introduced to the early art of around 50,000 BCE and encouraged to consider why these original artists created their works. Additional units progress chronologically and show how art evolved in step with developed settlements. The book introduces great structures erected during the Bronze Age and demonstrates how the Iron Age influenced the art of ancient Greece. Students read about trade, the rise of empires, the dawn of deities, and how each of these historical developments profoundly impacted the type of art created during each time period. The final unit focuses on the end of ancient civilizations. Featuring a uniquely inclusive approach, A World Perspective of Art History is an ideal resource for courses in art history and art appreciation.