Attika

What Stewart offers us in this recent book is a series of well-developed essays on a variety of topics. He is dealing, as he himself asserts, with the most obscure period of all for Greek sculpture. In trying to piece together and understand the development of Hellenistic sculpture in Attica, he very sensibly uses on the one hand the evidence of terracottas, which as he himself admits are the only pieces which can be used to fill some of the gaps in an otherwise vast jigsaw puzzle; on the other he attempts to clarify the picture of portraiture, a field so much neglected in recent books on the Hellenistic age, and to show its importance in the comprehension of sculptural style and currents during this period.