Making Sense of Greek Art
Ancient Visual Culture and its Receptions

 This volume of ten essays by classicists, art historians and archaeologists seeks to engage with the intellectual challenge that is making sense of Greek art. Each essay and the collection as a whole strives to ask what is at stake historically in the designation 'Greek art' through the close study of a variety of objects, including sculptures, paintings, mirrors and mosaics, in their ancient Greek context and through their later adoptions and reworkings from the Hellenistic and Roman periods.

Chronologically, the essays cover the so-called Archaic period in Greece, from 750-500 BCE, up to the Crystal Palace at Sydenham in mid nineteenth-century Britain. With this vast historical panorama, the volume offers a series of discreet historical case-studies, with a surprising overlap in the recurring themes of originality and reproduction, cultural identities and desire.

Note: The Classical Reception Studies Network was formed in 2004 by six universities with research specialisms in various aspects of Classical Reception Studies (Bristol, Durham, Nottingham, Open, Oxford and Reading). Network partners now include the University of St. Andrews, Royal Holloway University of London, Goldsmiths University of London, the Institute of Classical Studies, University College Dublin and the University of Birmingham Institute of Archaeology.

Contributions by
Zosia Archibald, Viccy Coltman, Shelley Hales, Christopher Hallett, Vedia Izzet, Ed Lilley, Genevieve Liveley, Michael Liversidge, Kate Nichols and Nicki Waugh

List of Illustrations; Introduction; Chapter one: Contextual iconography: The horses of Artemis Orthia; Nicki Waugh; Chapter two: Reconsidering the meanings of Athenian figured vases; Zosia Archibald; Chapter three: Reflections of Greek myth in Etruria: Thetis; Vedia Izzet; Chapter four: Aphrodite's Mirror: Reflections of Greek Art in Roman Houses; Shelley Hales; Chapter five: The Archaic Style in Sculpture in the eyes of ancient and modern viewers; Christopher Hallett; Chapter six: Jacques-Louis David, the Greek Ideal, and an Alternative; Ed Lilley; Chapter seven: 'the most ancient Monuments of the Fine Arts': Collecting and displaying Greek vases in early nineteenth-century English interiors; Viccy Coltman; Chapter eight: Sculpturae uitam insufflat pictura: Breathing life into Greek sculpture in the works of Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Jean-Leon Gerome; Genevieve Liveley; Chapter nine: 'Living Alma-Tadema Pictures': Hypatia at The Haymarket Theatre; Michael Liversidge; Chapter ten: Marbles for the Masses: The Elgin Marbles at the Crystal Palace, Sydenham; Kate Nichols.

VICCY COLTMAN is Senior Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Edinburgh and has held visiting fellowships at the British School at Rome; Center for British Art; Yale University; the National Gallery of Art in Washington; IASH (Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanties, University of Edinburgh); CRASSH (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge); and the Huntington Library, California