Drawing the Greek Vase

Caspar Meyer is Professor of Classical Archaeology and Material Culture at the Bard Graduate Center in New York. His research focuses on the cultural dynamics of craft production in the Aegean city states and among the mobile pastoralists of Eurasia. Another area of interest is the history of the instruments and media which archaeologists have developed to aid the transformation of artefacts into written explanations. He previously taught in London and held research fellowships at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and the Centre Louis Gernet in Paris. He is editor of W86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture.Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of St Andrews. She has published Truly beyond Wonders: Aelius Aristides and the Cult of Asklepios (OUP 2010) and many articles on religion, travel, and the body in the Greek world of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. She also works on the reception of Classical material culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, and has edited The Classical Vase Transformed: Consumption, Reproduction, and Class in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (OUP 2020) with E. Hall.

This edited volume, handsomely produced, comprises twelve chapters by ten contributors, including four from the editors. Its subject is the enduring practice, stretching back to the 1500s, of illustrating Greek vases... anyone who enjoys Greek vases - as this reviewer does - is likely to find pleasure and insight in both the text and the many illuminating illustrations.

• 1: Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis: Introduction 2: Caspar Meyer: Why Drawing Still Matters: Connecting Hands and Minds in the Study of Greek Vases 3: Amy C. Smith: Winckelmann's Elegant Simplicity: From Three to Two Dimensions and Back Again 4: Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis: The Graphic Medium and Artistic Style: Thomas Hope (1769-1831) and Two-Dimensional Encounters with Greek Vases 5: Milette Gaifman: The Flattened Greek Vase 6: Marie-Amélie Bernard: Images of Greek Vases as a Basis for a Scientific Archaeology: Investigating the Archival Legacy of the Gerhard'scher Apparat's Drawings 7: Katharina Lorenz: Volume and Scale: Adolf Furtwängler and Karl Reichhold's Hervorragende Vasenbilder and the Study of Visual Narrative on Late Fifth-Century Vases 8: Athena Tsingarida: Drawing as an Instrument of Connoisseurship: J. D. Beazley and his Late-Nineteenth-Century Forerunners 9: Kate Morton: Drawing the Greek Vase: A British Museum Illustrator's Perspective 10: Nikolaus Dietrich: Drawing vs Photography: On the Gains and Losses of Technical Innovation 11: Vinnie Nørskov: The Use of Photographs in the Trade of Greek Vases 12: Caspar Meyer: Afterword