For over two thousand years, classical culture defined the development of Western civilization. This book recounts the creative achievements of the Greek and Roman artists who created it: their bold innovations that ran counter to tradition, their daring imagination, their unstoppable drive to capture in stone or paint—for the first time in history—the harmonious forms of the human body and the full richness of its emotions.
Time has not been kind to classical art, reducing its major monuments to astonishing ruins and the rest to a chaos of disparate fragments. However, surviving works and eyewitness accounts of lost treasures allow us to judge the grandeur of what the ancient Greeks and Romans created.