The study of Greek art is always on the move. New discoveries, made in Greece or in the various regions of the ancient world with which the Greeks were in contact, add to and/or alter the overall picture. However, renewed investigation of the material already known, seen in the light of the fresh evidence, and the reinterpretation that may follow – whether of sculpture, architecture, pottery, texts, and so forth – can be of equal, if not greater, importance.

In 2003, the 150th anniversary of the birth of Adolf Furtwängler was celebrated with an exhibition in his home town of Freiburg, accompanied by a memorial volume and an international symposium. His influence on Greek sculptural studies through emphasis on the search for individual craftsmen via Roman copies continues, particularly in Germany and the USA. The mystery of the ‘whodunit’ is still strong, and the cult of the creative artist is too deeply ingrained in our own thinking to be totally jettisoned for other, more impersonal considerations. There is such an innate desire to link a work of art to a name that, over the years, there has been a tendency to concentrate on the few names that have been vouchsafed to us from classical texts and the random discovery of inscriptions carrying the names of sculptors (the earliest dating from c.600 BC). Recent major exhibitions have centred round the sculptors Polykleitos, Praxiteles, and Lysippos, and there are studies that have highlighted the conjectural personalities of these and other named artists. Pollitt has declared his allegiance to this traditional approach:

Those who believe that ancient Greek art, like that of all other places and times, was the result of the insights, instincts, taste and choices of individual artists and not the product of impersonal, mechanical, evolutionary forces have good reason for wanting to carry on the tradition of Furtwängler.

The erection of a building – whether temple, treasury, colonnade, or theatre – argues purpose, means, advance planning, and commitment over many years. The number of people involved in any communal project, from sponsors (whether states, individuals, or sanctuary officials) to designers, architects, masons, and sculptors, was enormous. In studying architectural sculpture, we are face to face with originals, usually found in context, with some closely dated on the basis of inscriptions and references in written texts; although the later writers who held free-standing sculpture in such high regard had little to say about architectural compositions. The embellishment was usually added to religious buildings: the temples and treasuries that were erected in local and Panhellenic sanctuaries. The subjects chosen were mainly myths, with themes repeated down the centuries (Battles of the Gods versus the Giants, and Greeks versus Amazons, Centaurs, or Trojans) – they became the default choice, the stock-in-trade, and raise the question of the extent to which there was indeed any specific programmatic intent or local significance behind these mythical encounters. Who chose the subjects? With what purpose? To instruct, to underline social cohesion, to express political identity, to demonstrate superiority? Who were the viewers the designers had in mind? As the brightly coloured sculptures were integral to the building and came to be placed high above the heads of viewers, visitors, and pilgrims, they were obviously intended to take notice of them. Can we know what their reactions were and how deep their understanding was? Euripides in his tragedy Ion (412 BC) presents a chorus of Athenian women on their first visit to Delphi (vv. 184–218). They look up at the sculptures on the outside of the Apollo temple and express wonder and excitement at the figures they can recognize: Herakles, Pegasos, the battle of the Gods and the Giants, and particularly their own patron goddess, Athena. Euripides fits their reactions to their status – they are just glad to identify their favourites, and delight, as it were, at meeting old friends.

The uneven survival of material evidence from Greek antiquity has tended to guide interest and research towards the diferent forms and functions of sculpture (Chapters II and III) and of vase-painting (Chapters V and VI). They have been preserved in such numbers that, although we have only a fraction of the total output, we can study the ways in which they developed over the centuries against the social, economic, and political background and in the diferent parts of the Greek world. This has encouraged a tendency towards positivism and has had the unfortunate outcome of considering them as the exclusive elements of Greek art, with a concomitant emphasis on the aspects of restraint, simplicity, and so forth that were highlighted by the Neoclassical attitudes to Greek art that emerged in the eighteenth century. This approach has led scholars to demean the more lavish products that, by the very nature of their intrinsic value, have failed to survive in any numbers – gold, silver, ivory, and the like. Recent excavations, particularly those in cemeteries situated in the outlying areas of the Greek world and in the regions bordering on ancient Greece, have brought to light some of those expensive objects that are now missing from the Greek heartlands. Meanwhile, investigations into the more flamboyant aspects of Greek art have shown that buildings and architectural and freestanding sculpture were lavishly coloured. A nineteenth-century drawing by Donaldson shows coloured glass beads set into a column capital of the Erechtheion (Figure 21).

Clay is a versatile material with remarkable properties and serves a multitude of purposes. The Greeks shaped and fired clay for statues and figurines, for architectural elements such as metopes and akroteria, for drain pipes, beehives, lamps, and so forth. The major output was pottery, produced in great numbers by different methods (wheelmade, handmade, moulded) and in various categories (coarse, plain, decorated). It was a basic commodity that had many functions – for cooking, drinking, libation, storage, transport, and as offerings to the gods and to the dead. Over the centuries, painted pottery played a large and practical, if unsung, part in the lives of Greeks; it has been estimated that the hundreds of thousands of pots and fragments that are now extant comprise less than one per cent of the pottery produced. Current research into Greek ceramics is strong, and conferences, both national and international, over the past generation, mostly centring on Attic pottery, show how essential the study of pottery is for all aspects of the classical world and how it furnishes wide avenues for investigation. The contents of the published proceedings of the conferences show the main trends. Work on the traditional elements such as techniques, shaping, and painting, and iconography – that is, the initial stages of production – still continues, but there is now much more interest in functions, markets, find-spots, customers, reception, and the like, with complex pie charts, histograms, maps, and statistics, – that is, enquiries into the pottery once it had left the workshop (see Figure 4). This chapter deals with the manufacture of the pots, the shapes fashioned, the painting, and the contexts of use, with a little about the business elements; it also looks at the subject of attribution. The final chapter is mainly concerned with the variety of images and scenes that the pots carry. The chapters cannot be exclusive nor all-encompassing; they can highlight only various aspects. The emphasis, as in the conference proceedings mentioned above, falls on Attic pottery of the Archaic and Classical centuries, because it afords the fullest evidence.

As we have seen in previous chapters, throughout the Greek world, in cities, cemeteries, and sanctuaries, images, usually of figures in human form, were omnipresent, shaped at full and small size in wood, stone, and bronze, painted on panels and walls, and chosen as decoration for metal and clay vessels, for textiles, for jewellery and gems, for bone and ivory objects, and so on. Such images were constantly before the eyes of the men and women as they went about their daily lives. They acted as a visual language that was parallel to the oral versions in talk, recitation, songs, and plays. It is unlikely that the general public gave much thought to the men who made the images and gradually changed the look of the statues seen in the street, the reliefs that adorned the temples in the sanctuaries, the funerary monuments in the cemeteries, or the painted objects handled at home and elsewhere. They would have scanned the images for their content – figures created in their imagination or stories conjured up from the past that they had heard in public performance or private conversation, as well as scenes that related to the social life of their own day.