Princeton (2018) h/b 359pp (212 ills.) £30.00 (ISBN 9780691177038)
‘Classical art is a battleground’ is an arresting beginning to chapter 1 but is soon modified into ‘….is less a battleground than it is a moving target’ (p. 2). What V. is anxious to demonstrate is that the ‘life history’ that is the subject of her book is a complicated field of investigation and needs to be studied in a more nuanced way than previous researchers have undertaken. She urges us not to view the development with the hindsight of today but to see each stage emerging from and based on the subsequent stages. The word ‘classical’ itself, with related words such as ‘classicizing’, ‘Classical’ (with a capital ‘C’), has always proved troublesome, and V. underlines how the word has fluctuated in meaning over time.
Her chapters follow the life history from antiquity to the present, with a main emphasis on sculpture, and explain how the concept has developed as the centuries and cultures have succeeded one another. She seeks to stress that ‘classical art was made, not born’ (p.13), and that it has been transformed over two thousand years.
She sets the scene with the classical Greek background and pays particular attention to the statues of ‘The Tyrannicides’ that encapsulate many of the complex problems that occur later: the absence of originals, copies, craftsmen, casts, purpose, attributions, references in classical texts, etc. The chapters then make their way down the ages through the Hellenistic courts that absorbed classical Greek culture, refashioned it and passed it on to Rome, which in turn handed on this now ‘Greco-Roman’ stage to Constantinople. Then the stages advance from Renaissance Italy to European Courts and English country houses. Here a new approach in the 19th century explores an expanded terrain which incorporates more original Greek material, archaeology, museums, the art market, travel, the invention of photography, etc.—what V. calls ‘snowballing tensions between expertise and mass education, tradition and innovation, subjectivity and empiricism.’ In the last historical chapter, ‘The Death of Classical Art?’, she delights in underlining the importance of the innovative works of such artists as Jeff Koon and Matthew Darbyshire and the recent opening of the Mougins Museum of Classical Art in southern France which displays classical and modern side by side.
The choice of over 200 illustrations is masterly—some well-known, others fresh, and all apposite. Besides the varied material from antiquity, there is a whole range of post-antique material (oil on canvas, pen and ink drawings, prints, views, etc.). The images do not follow chronologically—David’s ‘The Oath of the Horatii’ of 1784 comes early in the first chapter set amongst the different versions of ‘The Tyrannicides’, and it is soon joined by Tiepolo’s oil painting ca. 1726 of ‘Apelles Painting the Portrait of Campaspe’.
V.’s book covers a vast amount of material in extraordinarily wide compass and depth. She helps us to understand that if we learn ‘about past ways of seeing, we see how our own are culturally contingent’. The book is not without humour—with such alliterative phrases as ‘connoisseurship and corruption’ (p. 52), ‘lust and learning’ (p. 54), ‘accuracy over aesthetics’ (p. 226). I particularly enjoyed the aperçu ‘As gods in training, emperors had the power to make desire literal’ (p. 76).
This is not a beginner’s book. It is an original and subtle treatment of classical art history, full of fresh ideas and new perspectives and is sure to provide a springboard for future advances.
Brian A. Sparkes