MARTIN ROBERTSON was a leading authority on ancient Greek art. Born into a distinguished academic family — the son of Donald Robertson, Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge, and brother to the late Giles Robertson, Professor of Art History at Edinburgh — he seems to have been predestined for a scholarly career.

He chose his own path, however, when as a young student in 1930 he first went out to Greece to take part in the new excavations at Perachora, started by Humfry Payne, the director of the British School at Athens. The summer spent with the charismatic Payne, and a further two years between 1934 and 1936 at the British School, instilled in Robertson a deep love of Greek art and of Greece itself.

He did not follow Payne as a field archaeologist, however — in later years he claimed he was “quite unfitted to conduct an excavation”. Instead, in September 1936, only a few months after Payne’s untimely death, Robertson was appointed Assistant Keeper in the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities in the British Museum. There he worked on, among many other things, the Greek pottery from Sir Leonard Woolley’s excavations at Al Mina in Syria, a large part of which came to the British Museum.

Following the unsanctioned cleaning of the Parthenon sculptures in 1937-38, Robertson lost his three years of seniority, despite having been out of the country for much of the time when the scandal was blowing up and, as one of the department’s most junior members, being anyway blameless.

As a result, when he and his friend and colleague Denys Haynes (who had joined the museum in the affair’s immediate aftermath) returned in 1946, after war service, they realised that they could not both progress within the museum. So Robertson took up the Yates Professorship at University College London in 1948, leaving the way clear for Haynes to succeed in due course to the keepership of the department.

Robertson spent some 13 years at University College, during which time he settled down with his wife and his growing family. He began to concentrate more on Classical Athenian pottery. Using the method pioneered by Sir John Beazley, the Oxford professor and a close family friend, of attributing unsigned vases to individual painters, he began to add flesh to Beazley’s skeleton lists. Robertson wrote two important articles on the early works of the so-called Berlin Painter. Nor did he forget his interest in earlier pottery: one particular article, written with Thomas Dunbabin, listing 7th-century BC Corinthian vase-painters and translating Beazley’s method to the best works of Corinthian potters, stands out.

Robertson completed the work on Perachora, left unfinished when Dunbabin, who himself had taken on the work from Payne, died. The climax of this London period, however, was the publication of Greek Painting (1959). In it he set out to recreate the lost art of Classical Greek wall-painting through his understanding of Athenian vase-painting, his interest in mosaics and the few extant reflections and traces of Greek wall-paintings.

In 1961 he was elected to the Lincoln Chair of Classical Archaeology and Art at Oxford, following in the footsteps of Beazley. During these early years in Oxford, Robertson became the champion of the importance and independence of the art-historical approach. When Beazley died in 1970, it was natural for Robertson to take on the burden of preparing the unfinished typescript of his final listing of Athenian vase-painters, Paralipomena. Somehow, as well as this labour of love, Robertson also managed to complete his magisterial and monumental two-volume work, A History of Greek Art (1975), at this time. It was the culmination of all the work that he had done over the previous 30 years and remains the finest and most important survey of ancient Greek art in any language.

He retired from the Oxford chair in 1978 and moved back to his home city of Cambridge. Not many years into retirement his wife, and the mother of his six children, died. Nevertheless, through the support of his family, friends and, in due course, his second wife, Louise, he kept writing. In 1992 he published The Art of Vase-Painting in Classical Athens, his extraordinary overview of Athenian red-figured pottery, the aspect of Greek art that had always held his heart.

Robertson’s deep and wide-ranging scholarship was worn not only lightly but gently. His students were always treated with a kindly and encouraging patience; criticism rarely went beyond the equivocal “interesting”, while “splendid” signalled real appreciation. Colleagues of a different mind were listened to with respect and attention, for he was always ready to learn.

Robertson came from a deeply cultured family and it was no more of a surprise to hear him bandy quotations from early French literature with the French don across high table at Lincoln College than to have him lead one into a discussion of Renaissance painting.

His eyes were keen and his memory extraordinary. On his first trip to Athens he walked around the Acropolis and picked up at its foot a fragment of a red-figured cup that he recognised as coming from a masterpiece by the great Euphronios — he gave it to the authorities and let Emily Haspels publish it. This incident typifies the man — sight with vision, memory with scholarship, and deep selflessness.

Professor Martin Robertson, authority on Classical Greek art, was born on September 11, 1911. He died on December 26, 2004, aged 93.