Product Description

The Sculpture Collection of the National Archaeological Museum of Athens is a priceless treasure, not only because it contains works that are landmarks in the history of ancient Greek art, but mainly because it unfolds, with amazing fullness, the history of an artistic creativity that covered a period of an entire millennium.

In the thirty rooms of the museum, the specialist and the ordinary visitor alike can trace the development of ancient Greek sculpture from the earliest monumental pieces of the 7th century BC, the ‘Daidalic’ sculptures, to the end of antiquity (4th century AD).

The National Museum houses the richest collection of ancient sculpture in the world, and the group of Classical grave reliefs is unique in terms both of its numbers and of the quality of the sculptures.

Some years ago, the need began to be felt of a complete catalogue of the sculptures on display in the museum. The Director of this, the leading museum in Greece, Mr. Nikolaos Kaltsas, undertook the laborious, though highly valuable, task of compiling this catalogue.

The catalogue itself, one of the largest museum catalogues in the world, contains 800 pieces, the majority of which are illustrated by black-and-white photographs. The sculptures and reliefs are classified not only by successive historical periods, but also by category (sculptures in the round, grave reliefs, votive reliefs, and reliefs with decrees). The catalogue entries, supplemented in each case by a basic bibliography, are written in a clear and readily comprehensible style which is addressed not only to scholars but also to the general reading public.

For non-specialists, there is a useful brief introduction, which enables readers to form a general, clear idea of ancient sculpture from the Archaic period to the end of antiquity.