Greek Art

Description

John Boardman has updated his definitive survey of Greek art, the most influential and widely known historic artistic tradition of the Old World. In the 20 years since the last edition, valuable evidence has come to light which has dramatically enhanced our understanding of the arts of ancient Greece and their influence. We now know that Greek artists in fact completed their stone sculptures with realistic colour, as well as working with a wealth of other materials on a major scale. We can identify the work of individual artists, and schools of artists, and have a clearer picture than ever before of how art and artistic traditions travelled throughout the Greek world and beyond it. Boardman encourages the reader to consider the masterpieces that have been preserved in their original context, not just the isolated installations of our modern galleries, weaving into his discussion of the arts insights into the society that produced them. Illustrated in full colour throughout for the first time, this fifth edition demonstrates more vividly than ever the artistic aims and achievements of ancient Greece.

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.

'One of the very best short histories of Greek art' - Financial Times