Attic document reliefs

This book is a comprehensive study of all the known reliefs carved above inscribed documents, such as decrees or financial accounts, in Classical and Hellenistic Athens. Carol Lawton provides a completely fresh re-assessment of the meaning, style, function, and historical context of these reliefs, and places them in the history of Greek art. She brings together for the first time photographs and full descriptions of all the reliefs. Professor Lawton argues that the reliefs were not, as often assumed, private self-aggrandizing commissions of the secretaries or honorands named in the documents, but rather integral parts of the official publications, their context inextricable from and complementary to the stylistic and iconographic characteristics peculiar to the genre of document reliefs. Professor Lawton also discusses the usefulness of these reliefs for the comparative dating of other Greek sculpture.