The first volume in the series Studies in the History of Collections, this work places archaeology, history of art, and British antiquarianism in the wider context of Europe's cultural heritage. The Story focuses on antique sculpture, the principal type of classical art known to artists, collectors and scholars from the Renaissance until the later nineteenth century. Includes a complete catalogue of the Ashmolean Museum's casts and a fascinating Chronological Chart.

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...