Product Description

Greeks have voyaged on rafts and triremes, in sail-boats and steamships from the dawn of time to the present day. For them the boat is not simply a kind of machine, a means of commercial and cultural exchange, but a source of inspiration and creative art. The hands of anonymous craftsmen, bronze-smiths, sculptors have engraved boats in bronze, chiselled them in stone or marble, painted them on clay or wood, depicted them in wall-paintings and panel paintings, and embroidered them on cloth, making them of them ornaments, votives, or amulets.

The idea for an album on the subject of the ship from ancient times to the present day was conceived by the publishers Moisis and Rachel Kapon. It fills a gap by shifting the centre of gravity from the specialist to the general audience, which is enchanted by the idea of the ship, a seductive, timeless image, inextricably linked with the world-view and very nature of the Greeks. The text, written by Elsi Spathari, accompanies and protects the magical image, carrying the reader off on the unbroken journey of the ship through time. It presents the wide variety of forms assumed by boats in materials of all kinds and presents the characteristic features of each age through the way in which it conceived and executed this artistic subject.

The 360 colour illustrations contained in the 300 pages of the book have been selected to every kind of ship and the full chronological spectrum from ancient times to the present. The illustrations have been assembled from a large number of Greek and foreign museums in such a way as to form a fully representative collection.

Through these illustrations is revealed the unbroken connection of the Greeks with the sea. From Minos to Odysseus, from Themistokles to Pytheus, from the Pontus to Alexandria, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific, Greeks have always been seafarers and rulers of the sea, at every period of history.

The subject of this book is profoundly Greek. It helps us to distance ourselves from everyday reality through images beloved of all seafaring peoples, through journeys of which we all dream. It assembles together examples of the first means by which the people of this small, inaccessible land came into contact with neighbouring civilisations, the means by which horizons were opened up to freedom and development, the means that enabled them to impose their overpowering spirit on the rest of the world.

The Greek ship travels in space and time. Come aboard and travel with it on the sea routes of Greek history.