In this book, Catherine M. Keesling lends new insight into the origins of civic honorific portraits that emerged at the end of the fifth century BC in ancient Greece. Surveying the subjects, motives and display contexts of Archaic and Classical portrait sculpture, she demonstrates that the phenomenon of portrait representation in Greek culture is complex and without a single, unifying history. Bringing a multi-disciplinary approach to the topic, Keesling grounds her study in contemporary texts such as Herodotus' Histories and situates portrait representation within the context of contemporary debates about the nature of arete (excellence), the value of historical commemoration and the relationship between the human individual and the gods and heroes. She argues that often the goal of Classical portraiture was to link the individual to divine or heroic models. Offering an overview of the role of portraits in Archaic and Classical Greece, her study includes local histories of the development of Greek portraiture in sanctuaries such as Olympia, Delphi and the Athenian Acropolis.

This book offers a new approach to the history of Greek portraiture by focusing on portraits without names. Comprehensively illustrated, it brings together a wide range of evidence that has never before been studied as a group. Sheila Dillon considers the few original bronze and marble portrait statues preserved from the Classical and Hellenistic periods together with the large number of Greek portraits known only through Roman 'copies'. In focusing on a series of images that have previously been ignored, Dillon investigates the range of strategies and modes utilized in these portraits to construct their subject's identity. Her methods undermine two basic tenets of Greek portraiture: first, that is was only in the late Hellenistic period, under Roman influence, that Greek portraits exhibited a wide range of styles, including descriptive realism; and second, that in most cases, one can easily tell a subject's public role - that is, whether he is a philosopher of an orator - from the visual traits used in this portrait. The sculptures studied here instead show that the proliferation of portrait styles takes place much earlier, in the late Classical period; and that the identity encoded in these portraits is much more complex and layered than has previously been realized. Despite the fact that these portraits lack the one feature most prized by scholars of ancient portraiture - a name - they are evidence of utmost importance for the history of Greek portraiture.

"delightful, readable, and scholarly. The volume is profusely and well illustrated, each art example is clearly labelled and dated, and superb supplementary references for illustrations and supplementary suggestions for further reading are added to complete the study." Choice

This book lends new insight into the origins of civic honorific portraits that emerged at the end of the fifth century BC in ancient Greece.

Explores the art of ancient Greece and its relationship to the world in which it was produced.

The ancient Greeks devoted a significant portion of their poetic and artistic energy to exploring themes of death. Vermeule examines the facts and fictions of Greek death, including burial and mourning, visions of the underworld, souls and ghosts, the value of heroic death in battle, the quest for immortality, the linked powers of death, sleep, and love, and more. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979.

This is a book about Homer, myth and art. The Iliad and Odyssey so dominate our view of ancient Greece that our natural reaction on viewing certain works of early Greek art is to identify them as 'scenes from Homer'. However, Anthony Snodgrass argues that, so far from 'illustrating' the Homeric poems, these works very rarely show signs of acquaintance with the Iliad or Odyssey, seldom even choosing their subject-matter from them. When the subjects do overlap, the artists occasionally give positive signs of preferring a non-Homeric version of the episode. He then attempts to explain why this should be so: despite Homer's unique standing in antiquity, the artists inhabited an independent world, where their own inspirations and concerns dominated their production. It is only the traditional dominance of the literary study of antiquity which has hidden this from us.

In this wide-ranging study, Richard Neer offers a new way to understand the epoch-making sculpture of classical Greece. Working at the intersection of art history, archaeology, literature, and aesthetics, he reveals a people fascinated with the power of sculpture to provoke wonder in beholders. Wonder, not accuracy, realism, naturalism or truth, was the supreme objective of Greek sculptors. Neer traces this way of thinking about art from the poems of Homer to the philosophy of Plato. Then, through meticulous accounts of major sculpture from around the Greek world, he shows how the demand for wonder-inducing statues gave rise to some of the greatest masterpieces of Greek art. Rewriting the history of Greek sculpture in Greek terms and restoring wonder to a sometimes dusty subject, The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture is an indispensable guide for anyone interested in the art of sculpture or the history of the ancient world.