Iain Ferris has set himself a challenging task. It is in the nature of things that a lot of art relates to religion, and religion, with its arcane rituals and strange names, is not the popular subject it was, say, to our Victorian ancestors. The subject is not made any easier by the present-day lack of knowledge of Classical mythology and the tongue-twisting names of the gods. But Ferris meets his challenge of placing art and religion within the landscapes of north Britain. Nine chapters take us through various aspects. In the first, he sets the scene; historically, geographically, the distinction of the north versus the south of Britain, and community identity. The ‘Roman north’ is defined as the land from approximately the southern boundary of the Brigantes northwards to the Antonine Wall. The author emphasises that the sculpture of this area reflects this northern environment. ‘Art’ is defined widely, with words such as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ eschewed.
The second chapter, ‘Shadowplayers’, introduces us to the emperors represented in the north by coins and sculpture, while the title of the third, ‘Gods and Mortals’, defines itself. The fourth, ‘Artifice and transcendance’, focuses on the art of Eastern religions. It is impossible to avoid the army in northern Britain, and with chapter five, ‘The good soldier’, and the next, ‘Building an image’, we come face-to-face with these men. It is with chapter seven, ‘Image and identity’, that women – other than empresses, that is – appear on the scene. With chapter eight, ‘Remembering and forgetting’, we move to more esoteric aspects, the disposal of works of art and the implications of this in terms of a mourning for past events. With chapter nine, ‘A landscape of possibilities’, we move into the realm of art in the landscape, drawing on material discussed earlier but introducing new.
Ferris is helpful in placing many items into their wider context by recording the number of similar items found in Britain. It is in the nature of the evidence that sometimes the text reads like a catalogue, and certainly a map or two would have helped the reader not familiar with the northern regions of the province. The scope of the material brought together here is wide. I noted that the painted wall plaster in Chesters fort on Hadrian’s Wall and the putative Roman temple at Easter Langlee in the Scottish Borders are omitted, but otherwise it would be difficult to fault the breadth of the author’s knowledge.
It is impossible to consider every stimulating and challenging interpretation in a short review, so I will focus on the aspects where I believe I can contribute to the debate. The use of art as a deliberate act of resistance or subversion is touched on (pp 13–14 and 42). This concept, which has also been applied to pottery, seems to me to be problematic. We should note that one of the significant elements of the Principate is the lack of internal challenge after the rebellions of the first generation, such as that of Boudica, while, as a genealogist, I note that individual human memory rarely goes back beyond two generations, my assumption being that some two generations after the conquest most people accepted their new rulers.
Ferris offers a spirited discussion of the Antonine Wall distance slabs, a subject of particular interest to him, and the Hadrian’s Wall ‘pans’, pointing out that the former bear the only depictions of soldiers on sculpture in Roman Britain not on funerary commemorations. He discusses the reasons for the creation of these items unique in the Roman world and makes the point that the distance slabs would largely only be visible to soldiers, therefore suggesting that a motive behind their creation was the need for the soldiers to identify with the actions portrayed on the stones as well as making overt and coded statements about imperial authority and the Roman army. One element might have been the army celebrating that they were doing what they were established for, fighting Rome’s enemies and expanding the empire, not least after the pause under Hadrian. The recording of the lengths of the Wall constructed by each legion, down to a foot, Ferris considers might relate to competition between the legions but also was part of ‘a strategy for conceptualising the frontier and coming to terms with understanding the newly conquered territory’ (p. 122). One might ask, if this was the reason for the distance slabs, why they are unique? The distance slabs maintain their mystique.
The other objects with a mystique are the small bronze vessels associated with Hadrian’s Wall, generally called ‘pans’ but in size closer to soup ladles and more correctly called trullae. Interestingly, Ferris describes them as ‘representing a map to be held in the hand’ (p. 125). The Ilam Pan does not relate to this description with its ‘vegetal scrolling’ representing ‘a stylised design of plants and trees, the wild natural landscape and topography of the Roman north’ (p. 173), a step too far for this reviewer.
Ferris emphasises that much Roman art in the north would seem to have been preoccupied with movement through the landscape, a marrying of distance and time, situating recording and commemoration in the very landscape setting in which movements took place. Art and setting were here one and the same. Knowledge of local materials, of local stone outcrops, was gained by walking and traversing the land to try to understand its natural properties and essence, ‘turning Nature into culture’ (p. 125); an accurate summary of the primary theme of this book. If this was true of northern Britain, was it a purely British phenomenon or can it be recognised in other frontier provinces?
