Art Resource, New York, NY

ON THE COVER: Antelopes—spare and graceful as a Picasso drawing—decorate the wall of a house on the volcanic Aegean island of Thera. Until a massive blast rained ash over the island 3,500 years ago, Thera was the home of a prosperous civilization based on sea trade, as excavator Christos Doumas describes in “High Art from the Time of Abraham.”