Greek Art and Archaeology

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The National Museum in Cracow preserves an outstanding set of gems collected by Constantine Schmidt-Ciążyński (1818-1889). Architecture and city planning, sculpture, painting, pottery, metallurgy, jewelry, and numismatics are some of the areas covered. In a climate of pessimism in present day western cities, which are dealing with an increasingly precarious present, due to economic and other forms of instability, the durability of monumentality as “urban permanence” (the famous Aldo Rossi concept), appears to be among the few remaining symbolic and spatial rocks and as such is needed, maintained, enhanced, landscaped and even invented.

Stansbury-O’Donnell’s text is divided into fifteen chapters, with the first providing an introduction to the format of the book, followed by an explanation of terms and an overview of each chapter’s subject matter. It seems odd not to at least mention attempts (most recently and conspicuously that of Joan Connelly) to identify the subject of the Parthenon frieze as mythological, which is of course what one expects, based on other temple sculptures. Introduction Chronological Overview Crete and the Cyclades to the Late Bronze Age Greece and the Mycenaean World to c. Mark Stansbury-O’Donnell, Steven Tuck, and Dimitris Plantzos deserve credit for providing respectable choices to instructors who want to provide their undergraduate students with a comprehensive view of Greek or Roman art and architecture in a one-semester course.Numerous text boxes, chapter summaries and timelines, complemented by a detailed glossary, support student learning. This illustrated book features such archaeological artifacts as toys and gaming pieces alongside images of them in use by children on ancient vases, coins, terracotta figurines, bronze and stone sculpture, and marble grave monuments. At the same time, pertinent archaeological, literary, and historical material could be integrated into each unit, resulting in a seamless presentation of the material. In this way, the reader would have had a clear picture at the outset of the ways in which the works of art to be discussed exemplify the time when they were produced. Spanning Athenian life from the Mycenaean to the Byzantine eras, the 500 objects featured range from statues, pottery, and jewelry to tools, toys, a dog collar, and a large stone slab listing the dead from three battles of the Peloponnesian War, mentioned by Thucydides.

New insight into the origins of civic honorific portraits that emerged at the end of the fifth century BC in ancient Greece. For example, in the chapter on the Early Republic (3), he underscores the cross-cultural connections between Rome and the peoples of the Italian Peninsula by discussing a number of fourth century BCE Lucanian tomb paintings from Paestum (Figs. Complementing the other handbooks this volume also presents Greek sculpture made in the colonies of Italy and Sicily from the Archaic period onwards, as well as that made for eastern, non-Greek rulers.As a result, Greek archaeological spaces – both museums and sites – can be described as “sites of trauma”, as the placescapes where the unlived experiences of an imagined past become revived. In choosing a text for a survey of Greek art, an instructor would be hard pressed to find one that offers students more information than is presented in Stansbury-O’Donnell’s volume, but there is a downside to this approach: there are, in fact, too many works discussed in this book and this plethora of monuments may create a distraction for the reader. Three following chapters cover the Greek Bronze Age, then seven chapters address the historical periods from 1100 BC to 31 BC.