Painting was one of the major achievements of the Classical world. This book examines the development of mural and panel painting in the Classical world from the earliest Minoan and Cycladic frescoes of the Aegean Bronze Age to late Roman painting, from approximately 1800 B.C. to A.D. 400. It provides a comprehensive study of major monuments, including exciting new material that has been discovered in recent years and has transformed the field. It also offers a critical overview of scholarly debates and controversies on aspects of style, iconography, technique, and cultural context. This volume provides an up-to-date and much-needed overview of the monuments that are now known and of the ideas that have been generated about them.

The aim of this book is to identify and assess the distinctive styles of five important ancient Greek sculptors. By using the most recent archaeological evidence and reevaluating both the ancient literary sources and earlier scholarly literature, the international group of authors whose essays appear here expands our understanding of the role of personal styles in ancient art.

This book, a companion volume to Professor Pollitt's The Art of Rome: Sources and Documents (published by the Press in 1983), presents a comprehensive collection in translation of ancient literary evidence relating to Greek sculpture, painting, architecture, and the decorative arts. Its purpose is to make this important evidence available to students who are not specialists in the Classical languages or Classical archaeology. The author's translations of a wide selection of Greek and Latin texts are accompanied by an introduction, explanatory commentary, and a full bibliography. An earlier version of this book was published twenty-five years ago by Prentice-Hall. In this new publication Professor Pollitt has added a considerable number of new passages, revised some of his earlier translations and presented the texts in a different order which allows the reader to follow more easily the development of sculpture and painting as perceived by the ancient writers. The new and substantial bibliography, organised by topics as they appear in the book, emphasises works that deal directly with the literary sources or that supplement our knowledge of the personalities and monuments described in the sources. This collection will be welcomed by students and teachers of Greek art who have long been in need of an authoritative and reliable sourcebook for their subject.

What did the ancient Greeks think about their own art? J.J. Pollitt attempts to answer this question by studying the critical terminology of the ancient Greeks-the terms they used to describe and evaluate sculpture, painting, and architecture. Although Greeks and Romans with a wide variety of backgrounds and interests-including artists, philosophers, rhetoricians, historians, and guidebook writers-wrote about art in antiquity, very few of their works have survived. Mr. Pollitt has therefore had to draw largely on works of authors who, while discussing some other subject, make passing references to art for the purpose of analogy or illustration. By carefully assembling and organizing these fragments, he presents a coherent view of art criticism in ancient Greece. This study is divided into two parts. The first part provides a general history of Greek art criticism and its sources. The second is an extensive glossary which collects, translates, and analyzes passages from Greek and Latin authors in which important critical terms are used. The book can therefore be used by art historians and classicists as both a scholarly text and an important work of reference.