Early Greek Vase Painting: 11th-6th Centuries BC

Description

All the components of Greek art which were to culminate in the Classical styles of the 5th century BC can be traced in the development of vase painting in early Greece, form the 11th to the 6th centuries BC. geometric styles gave way by about 700 BC to the influence of the Near East; in the following Orientalizing period the Greeks learned how to tell a story in pictures;and by the 6th century various regional studios were competing with the dominant Corinthian and Athenian potters and painters for markets east and west. Early Greek vases display the craft at its most mathematical, it most colourful, and in its most directly story telling mode. They closely mirror the history and culture of their day. The later achievements of Greek art can only be fully understood in the light of this formative period of variety, competition and experiment. There are three companion volumes to this handbook, all by Sir John Boardman: Athenian Black Figure Vases, Athenian Red Figure Vases: the Archaic Period, and Athenian Red Figure Vases: the Classical Period.

Sir John Boardman was born in 1927, and educated at Chigwell School and Magdalene College, Cambridge. He spent several years in Greece, three of them as Assistant Director of the British School of Archaeology at Athens, and he has excavated in Smyrna, Crete, Chios and Libya. For four years he was an Assistant Keeper in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and he subsequently became Reader in Classical Archaeology and Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. He is now Lincoln Professor Emeritus of Classical Archaeology and Art in Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy, from whom he received the Kenyon Medal in 1995. He was awarded the Onassis Prize for Humanities in 2009. Professor Boardman has written widely on the art and archaeology of Ancient Greece.