""Megan E. O'Neil is an assistant professor of art history at Emory University"" ""David Saunders is associate curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum.""
"""Picture Worlds is a brilliantly innovative project, bringing together three diverse ceramic traditions--Greek, Moche, and Maya--that shared a love for dynamic scenes of gods, heroes, and monsters. While each pot is fascinating in its own right, the ceramics gain immeasurably from being juxtaposed and analyzed in terms of form, composition, and narrative strategies."" --Alan Shapiro, W. H. Collins Vickers Professor of Archaeology, Emeritus, Johns Hopkins University ""In Picture Worlds, Saunders and O'Neil have assembled leading scholarly voices on ancient Greek, Moche, and Maya painted pottery to explore the shared human practice of infusing eating and drinking vessels with sacred histories through elaborate image-making traditions. In presenting deep dives into these disparate case studies together for the first time, they raise larger questions about the role of communities of artistic practice in creating supernatural beings and congealing mythological narratives on tangible things, thus bolstering human rulers' claims to divinity as they celebrated in life or as they entered the afterlife."" --James Doyle, Director of the Matson Museum of Anthropology at Penn State, and co-editor of Lives of the Gods: Divinity in Maya Art"