Sir John Beazley, the world’s greatest scholar of Athenian figure-decorated pottery, held his first academic position at Christ Church, and the Library houses rare and important books on ancient Greek art. To celebrate his life's work, in 2017, Christ Church Library has opened an exhibition. The objects selected for display, combined with the individual books and manuscripts were meant to put Beazley's contribution to scholarship in context.
This volume, edited by Diana Rodríguez Pérez, Thomas Mannack, and Cristina Neagu, was produced partly as a companion to the above mentioned exhibition, but also as an aid to undergraduates studying for Mods, Prelims, Greats, and Finals, postgraduates, and anyone else interested in Greek vases and the history of scholarship.
The publication of this volume would not have been possible without the generous support of the Ashmolean Museum and the Beazley Archive in the Classical Art Research Centre.
About the Authors
Before joining the Beazley Archive in 2014, Dr Diana Rodríguez Pérez was FECYT-Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. She received her PhD (Doctor Europaea) from the University of León, Spain, with a dissertation entitled The Snake in the ancient Greek World: Myth, Rite and Image, and obtained a Master’s degree in Archaeology and Heritage from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Her research focuses on the art and archaeology of ancient Greece, with an emphasis on vase-painting, iconography and Greek pottery in the archaeological record. Her publications include: Serpientes, dioses y héroes: el combate contra el monstruo en el arte y la literatura griega antigua (León, 2008) and Evocative Objects. The Attic Black-Glazed Plemochoai (Exaleiptra) between Archaeology and Vase Painting (forthcoming in On the Fascination of Objects: Greek and Etruscan Art in the Shefton Collection). She has also edited the volume Greek Art in Context (Routledge, 2017).
Dr Thomas Mannack studied Classical Archaeology, Ancient History, and Pre-History at Heidelberg, Oxford, and Kiel, where he submitted his doctoral thesis on Beazley’s Later and Latest Mannerists. He has been working at the Beazley Archive, Oxford, since 1986, where he is in charge of the Archive’s database of Greek figure-decorated pottery, and has taught Greek and Roman Art for 25 years. Titular Reader in Classical Iconography since 2006, Lecturer in Classical Archaeology since 2007.
Dr Cristina Neagu Former Keeper of Special Collections at Christ Church Library specialises in the literature and arts of the Renaissance. The fields in which most of her work has been conducted include Neo-Latin literature, rhetoric, art history and history of the book. Among her research interests are Central and East European humanism, illuminated manuscripts and Albrecht Dürer as theoretician and reformer of the image. Recent publications include Servant of the Renaissance: The Poetry and Prose of Nicolaus Olahus (Peter Lang, 2003); ‘The Power of the Book and the Kingdom of Hungary during the Fifteenth Century’ in Humanism in Fifteenth-Century Europe (Medium Aevum, 2012); 'The Lesser Durer:Text and Image in Early Modern Broadsheets' in The Perils of Print Culture: Theory and Practice in Book, Print and Publishing History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); 'East- Central Europe' in The Oxford Handbook of Neo Latin Studies (Oxford University Press, 2015).
