Athenian art of the sixth and fifth centuries BC offers the yardstick by which we judge the artistic achievement of the rest of the Greek world, and provides the models on which the later history of Greco-Roman art and much of the art of the later western world are based. The evidence is rich: some long known, like the Parthenon marbles, some fresh from the ground. These six essays, by prominent classical art-historians, British, German and American, explore some of the subjects and problems in the art of Archaic and Classical Athens which have exercised scholars in recent years. The essays are dedicated to Martin Robertson, formerly Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art in the University of Oxford, himself a leading scholar of Classical art, and author of the magisterial A History of Greek Art (Cambridge University Press 1976) and of A Shorter History of Greek Art (Cambridge University Press 1981).
