Artful Crafts: Ancient Greek Silverware and Pottery [Paperback]

Michael Vickers (Author), David Gill (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 1996

This book challenges the widely held view that Greek pottery vases were objects of great value in antiquity, commissioned by rich patrons from the greatest artists of the day. Instead, they are shown to have been simply low cost versions of tableware originally made in silver and gold. Vickers and Gill demonstrates how Greek pottery first came to be regarded as a high value commodity in the eighteenth century thanks to clever, if not fraudulent, sales techniques. They explore the ways in which work in gold and silver influenced painted pottery, and examine the primary sources, both literary and epigraphic, to find what materials the ancients did consider to be important.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Entertaining as well as scholarly....[A] lively, intelligent, highly polemical book."--The New York Review of Books

"[Vicker's book] should be required reading for all students of Classical Archaeology."--Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (August 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0198150709
• ISBN-13: 978-0198150701
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 7.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,307,920 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Unrecyclable Junk, April 11, 2010

By 

William A. Percy "William A. Percy" (Professor of History, UMass Boston) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Artful Crafts: Ancient Greek Silverware and Pottery (Paperback)

In several decades of unseemingly bitter back-biting strife, the doyen of

Greek vase studies, Sir John Boardman, has attacked Michael Vickers'

theories, summed up on Vicker and Gill's Artful Crafts (date), which

insists, against all evidence and reason, that Greek elites _always_ (a

word very dangerous for historians to use) supped and dined from silver

and gold sympotic wares. In fact, "the Greeks," however wealthy during

Mycenean times, were far too poor during their dark age and even their

early Archaic period for any any of them, except perhaps for a few early

tyrants, to have used sympoticware made from precious metals. The

iconoclastic Vickers even goes so far as to claim that black figure pots,

which began to be produced around 630, copied gold ones, the red

background of Athenian clay being equated with gold, and the black figures

painted upon it with inlaid unpolished silverware. He goes on to state

that the red figure vases, replacing the black figures around a half

century later, copied gold inlaid into silver, which unpolished was black.

Even more astounding, he claims that purple, a rarer color on pottery,

represented copper originals, while white represented ivory originals --

total nonsense. He does prove that the cost of the decorated pots were

minimal, in contrast to Boardman's claims, and that they therefore cannot

have affected, Boardman to the contrary, the balance of payments in

Athenian trade. The silverware, which the Greek elites, excepting an

occasional tyrant, first began to use at symposia after 480, were very

expensive and they did affect the balance of payments in Athenian foreign

trade. Boardman, however, fails to acknowledge that silver sympoticware,

replaced the ceramicware, which he calls vaaaases, equating the painters

thereof to Michaelanelo, but Vickers dubs at pots, worthless ballast and

unrecyclable junk.