This book will do for the next generation of students and general readers what its predecessor has done for the last - provide an authoritative and readable guide to the history of Greek art. It is a considerably enlarged and rewritten version of a work that has served hundreds of thousands in many languages since the early 1960s. As the author says, "This edition is different in that it takes into account new finds as well as new ideas and attitudes to the subject...

I have attempted here to place Greek art back into Greece and away from galleries and art books, to try to recapture what it meant to its makers and viewers, and so better value what it has meant to later artists in the western world. The original intentions and the way these masterpieces are viewed today are often leagues apart.

But foremost my aim has been to explain what Greek art looks like, how to look at it, how to enjoy it as something beyond the tourist's Parthenon or a broken museum marble, as part of our common heritage."