Not so long ago, developing an informed appreciation for Greek vases, in particular fineware with painted scenes, was no easy matter for anyone aside from serious students and dedicated connoisseurs with access to the world’s museums. As for illustrated books, there wasn’t much between the affordable volumes of John Boardman’s Thames & Hudson paperback series, with their masterly text and plentiful but small and hard-to-see photographs in black and white, and expensive volumes with magnificent photos, mostly relegated to academic libraries. That’s all changed, largely because of the Internet, where high-resolution photographs of individual vases — on academic and curatorial websites with expert analysis, certainly, but also on the Flickr accounts of museumgoing tourists — let you zoom in on the tiny details in which much of the delight of Greek vase painting lies. But the lower cost of printing has also put beautifully printed large-format books within reach, and for readers getting interested in Greek vases for the first time, a coherent illustrated overview of the subject is invaluable and much more manageable on the page than on-screen.

Lavishly illustrated, The Greek Vase: Art of the Storyteller is a beautiful book, its glorious photographs seeming to promise an equally illuminating text—a promise regrettably left unfulfilled for the general reader to whom it is addressed. The images are drawn primarily from the collections of the British Museum and spiced with a fair number from the J. Paul Getty Museum.