For many people there is no more satisfying expression of Greek art than its sculpture. It was the first, the only ancient art to break free from 'conceptual' conventions for representing men and animals, and to explore consciously how art might imitate nature or even improve upon it. The first stages of this discovery, from the semi-abstract beginnings in the eighth century BC to the more representational art of the early fifth century, are explored and copiously illustrated in this handbook.

Author Biography

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.