Dr Nigel Spivey

MA, PhD
Official Fellow; Postgraduate Tutor; Tutor
Senior Lecturer in Classical Art and Archaeology in the Faculty of Classics
Nigel Spivey first came to Emmanuel as an undergraduate in 1977, reading Philosophy and Classics. After a year’s work with Vietnamese refugees he did a PhD on Etruscan vase-painting, with studentships at the British School at Rome and the University of Pisa. He rejoined the college as a Research Fellow from 1986-89; then taught at the University of Wales before taking up a lectureship in Classical Archaeology at Cambridge, in 1992.
His doctoral dissertation was published in 1987. Since then he has written widely on Classical and art-historical topics (a list of titles below). He has also presented a number of television documentaries, including the five-part BBC/PBS series How Art Made the World (2005; episodes may be found on Youtube). He has worked at the Getty Research Institute and the ANU Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at Canberra. At Emmanuel he has served as Tutor, Praelector, and Director of Studies in Classics
As a student he represented Cambridge in athletics and in 1983 set a new record for throwing the hammer at the Oxford-Cambridge match. His publications include several contributions to the history of ancient athletics.
His current research is a study of Sappho’s image down the ages, and a monograph entitled The Epic Tale of Trajan’s Column.
PUBLICATIONS in order chronological
Books
1) The Micali Painter and his Followers (Oxford UP 1987: 113pp)
2) Un artista etrusco e il suo mondo (De Luca, Rome 1988; = Le peintre de Micali et son monde, Puy-de-Dome 1989) [Catalogue of an exhibition co-organized with the Villa Giulia Museum]
3) Etruscan Italy (Batsford 1990: 168pp) [co-written with Simon Stoddart]
4) Looking at Greek Vases (Cambridge UP 1991: 282pp) [co-edited with Tom Rasmussen] – NS contribution being ‘Greek Vases in Etruria’, 131-50 [Greek edition 1997]
5) Understanding Greek Sculpture (Thames and Hudson 1996: 240pp) [Greek edition 2004]
6) Greek Art (Phaidon 1997: 447pp) [Greek edition 1999; Japanese 2000; French, Korean 2001]
7) Etruscan Art (Thames and Hudson 1997: 216pp) [Spanish edition 1998]
8) 75: Phaidon 1923-98 (Phaidon 1999: 75pp)
9) Enduring Creation: Art, Pain and Fortitude (Thames and Hudson/California UP 2001: 272pp) [Ch.10 anthologized in W. Kelly ed., Art and Humanist Ideals (Macmillan 2003), 99-106; a version of Ch.5 published in Aeimnestos: Miscellanea di Studi per Mauro Cristofani II (Centro Di 2006), 918-25]
10) The Ancient Olympics (Oxford UP 2004: 273pp). Second (revised) edition 2012
11) Panorama of the Classical World (Thames and Hudson/Getty Publications 2004: 368pp) [co-written with Michael Squire] [German, Hungarian, Dutch editions 2005; Japanese, Romanian 2007]
12) How Art Made the World (BBC/Basic Books 2005: 288pp) [Accompanied five-part television series for BBC/PBS/BBC Worldwide, first broadcast May-June 2005. Translated into German, Dutch, Hungarian, Japanese, Chinese]
13) Songs on Bronze: Greek Myths Retold (Faber/Farrar Strauss Giroux 2005)
14) Greek Sculpture (Cambridge UP 2013: 329pp) [revised/rewritten version of no. (5)]
15) Classical Civilization: Greeks & Romans in Ten Chapters (Head of Zeus 2015; 353pp)
16) The Sarpedon Krater: Life and Afterlife of a Greek Vase (Head of Zeus 2018: 256pp)
Selected Articles, Essays & Review-Articles
1) ‘La carriera del Pittore di Micali’, in Prospettiva 40 (1986), 10-19
2) ‘The Armed Dance on Etruscan Vases’, in Proceedings of the Third International Symposium on Ancient Greek and Related Pottery (Copenhagen 1988), 592-603
3) ‘The Power of Women in Etruscan Society’, in Accordia Research Papers 2 (1991), 59-67
4) ‘Ajax in Etruria’, in Atti e Memorie della Società Magna Grecia 1992, 233-42
5) ‘Psephological Heroes’, in R. Osborne and S. Hornblower eds., Ritual, Finance, Politics (Oxford UP 1994), 39-51
6) ‘Bionic Statues’, in A. Powell ed., The Greek World (Routledge 1995), 442-59
7) ‘Meanings and Messages’, in Cambridge Archaeological Journal 5.2 (1995), 314-22
9) ‘Etruscomania and Etruscosense’, in American Journal of Archaeology 100 (1996), 170-73
10) ‘In Defense of Schliemann?’, in H. Duchêne, The Golden Treasures of Troy (London/New York 1996), 134-5
11) ‘Meditations on a Greek Torso’, in Cambridge Archaeological Journal 7.2 (1997), 309-14
12) Introduction to Robert Graves, The Claudius Novels (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics, 1999), vii-xii
13) ‘Cognition: thought, ideas, and belief’ [with Steven Mithen], in G. Barker ed., Companion Encyclopaedia of Archaeology (Routledge 1999) Vol. 2, 714-54 (my section)
14) ‘Greek Art beyond Greece’, in M. Kemp ed., The Oxford History of Western Art (Oxford UP 2000), 32-37
15) ‘Greek Vases in Etruria’, in American Journal of Archaeology 110 (2006), 659-61
16) ‘Volcanic landscape with kraters’, in Greece & Rome 54 (2007), 230-53 [also published in D. Yatromanolakis ed., An Archaeology of Representations: Ancient Greek Vase Painting and Contemporary Methodologies, Kardamitsa 2009, 50-75]
17) ‘The Emergence of the Classical Style’, in British Journal of Aesthetics 52 (2012), 107-110
18) ‘Pythagoras and the Origins of Olympic Ideology’: in B. Goff & M. Simpson eds., Thinking the Olympics (Duckworth 2011), 21-39
19) ‘From Aigai to Nikopolis: The Art and Archaeology of Hellenistic Greece’, in Pharos 20.1 (2014), 221-40
20) ‘Paradossografia etrusca’, in M.C. Biella & E. Giovanelli eds., Nuovi studi sul bestiario fantastico di età orientalizzante nella penisola italiana (Trento 2016), 385-94
21) ‘Homer and the Sculptors’, in J. Bintliff & K. Rutter eds., The Archaeology of Greece and Rome: Studies in Honour of Anthony Snodgrass (Edinburgh UP 2016), 113-51
22) ‘Archaic and Late Archaic Art, 580-450 BCE’ (with Maurizio Harari), in A. Naso ed., Etruscology (De Gruyter 2017), 943-969
23) ‘Epic Games’, in C. Renfrew, I. Morley & M. Boyd eds., Ritual, Play and Belief in Evolution and Early Human Societies (Cambridge UP 2017), 250-263
24) ‘The Piping Crab’, in V. Bellelli & A.M. Nagy eds., Superis deorum gratus et imis: Papers in Memory of J. Gy. Szilágyi (Rome 2018), 135-148
25) ‘Representations’, in P. Christesen & C. Stocking eds., The Cultural History of Sport, I: Antiquity (Bloomsbury 2021), Ch. 8
26) ‘Visions of Sappho’, for The Brill Companion to the Reception of Sappho (in press)
27) ‘The Horse with No Name’, in E. Horswell ed., Nic Fiddian Green: Sculptor of Stone (London 2022), 10-27
28) ‘Fortuitous Beauty’, in M. Di Fazio, M.E. Gorrini & S. Paltinieri eds., Verbis ut imagine pingo. Studi in onore di Maurizio Harari (Rome 2024), 433-444