A Handbook of Greek Vase Painting. By Mary A. B.
Herford. (Manchester University Press and Longmans. 9s. 6d. net.)— Miss Herford's handbook, lucid, scholarly, and admirably illus- trated, will serve, as she hopes, to introduce .tho inexpert reader to a most fascinating province of art. It is instructive to remember that, when Athens in her prime reigned over the Aegean, her chief article of export was the painted vase, and that the fall of Athens at the end of the long and desperate Peloponnesian War in 404 B.O. involved her great ceramic industry in ruin. The Attic vase-painters migrated to Southern Italy and other lands, but no foreign potteries could equal the red-figured vases of fifth-century Athens. The art died out, and was forgotten so completely that, when eighteenth-century antiquaries found Attic vases in Etruscan tombs, they called them Etruscan vases, though Etruria had produced nothing of the kind. Since then the study of Greek vases has become a mostimportant branch of archaeology, and their beauty—within the limits of a strict convention—has captured the world anew.
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