A fluid and pervasive style of thought: that is how Viccy Coltman sums up British neoclassicism in this important new survey of late eighteenth-century art and culture. Where A. H. Layard, Adolf Michaelis, and company wagged a chastizing Victorian finger at the neoclassical disjuncture between form and function (whoever heard of a classicizing teapot?), this book aims at a more sympathetic approach. For Coltman, the neoclassical is to be understood not simply as an ahistorical departure in style, taste, or decorative zeal; rather, it is the aestheticization of a phenomenon rooted in social change and economic upheaval. Neoclassicism, Coltman claims, should take its place within a much larger frame of cultural reference: like imperialism and colonialism, it is a discursive mode of “translation, dissemination and imitation” (11).

The book's introduction characterizes classical pedagogy as the center of gravity around which all spheres of high cultural life orbited in the late eighteenth century. The point is well made, not least in the reconstruction of academic time-tabling in British public schools (at Eton some 88 percent of lessons were reserved for learning classical languages [12]). Each of the subsequent six chapters looks at discrete examples of this classical fanaticization in action. The first and most successful chapter foregrounds the library as the chief site of the neoclassical enterprise, where classical authors met with, and were transformed into, the material possessions of the elite. The remaining case studies turn to the Grand Tour and its monumentalization in deluxe folios (chap. 2), Sir William Hamilton's vase publications and their influence on interior decoration (chap. 3), the reconstruction and influence of the Vesuvian sites in the British imagination (chap. 4), the recasting of classical statues (chap. 5), and the sculptural collection of Charles Townley (chap. 6). An all too brief conclusion reprises the book's refrain: that neoclassicsm is the physical incarnation of classical intellectual programming.

This is an impeccably researched and beautifully illustrated volume, founded on a broad-ranging analysis of documents that relate to some of the most important movers and shakers of the eighteenth century, but which have frequently languished in parochial local archives. Coltman shows herself no less accomplished as an art historian—as, for instance, in her reading of Johann Zoffany's Charles Townley's Library, with its artful distillation of statues from all over Townley's house into his personal library (though Jonathan Scott's important work is here, as elsewhere, strangely neglected). The book's publication could not have been more timely. Its challenge to monolithic constructions of the classical, together with its talk of classicism's endless adaptability (parentheses on the purposeful “literal and figurative” connotations of the word invariably in tow), nicely compares with Salvatore Settis's less-structured thoughts on the Future of the Classical (Cambridge, 2006), published in the same year. These aspects alone make this a book of major interest to art historians, cultural critics, and classicists alike.

But questions remain to be answered. One cannot help but feel that the volume reneges on its promise of adding up to more than the sum of its parts: the introduction and conclusion fail to carve out a larger relevance for the material presented, and the rather halfhearted bows to Pierre Bourdieu (like the lackluster nod to Jacques Derrida [226 n. 16]) in fact only draw attention to Coltman's failure to realize the larger qualitative import for her primarily quantitative survey. One problem lies with the choice of dates: nowhere does Coltman reveal why she has chosen these suspiciously rounded parameters, nor is chronology ever flagged as an important variable within the thematic analysis. The refusal to justify or explain the particular choice of case studies might also make us apprehensive about those “fabrications of the antique” that are omitted: the filtration of neoclassical motifs down through lower British social strata, for example, the sexual fetishizing of the antique, or indeed the rainbow of political colorings with which different ancient models came to be associated (even accepting Coltman's contentious hypothesis that in Britain “the antique was never called upon as a charged ideological force … as it was in contemporary France and Germany” [9]; can we really afford to overlook British responses to such appropriations, not least in Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France?). Not since International Gothic had such a pan-European artistic movement taken on such independent national identities, and yet Coltman's fusion of Robert Adam's Grand Tour with, for instance, Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Italian Journey elides those important national differences (the author admits as much [226, n. 10] but proceeds nonetheless).

Still more frustrating, perhaps, is the book's reluctance to tackle head-on this knotty term “neoclassical.” If, as Coltman contends, classicism is a “style of thought” and neoclassicism its “material application” (11; note though, how neoclassicism fuzzily becomes a “fluid and pervasive style of thought” [195]), what is the relationship between the two? Do they necessarily align, or might each develop, contend with, or even contradict the other? In what ways, indeed, does neoclassicism (always with a small “n”?) relate to Palladianism, Egyptomania, or Chinoiserie? And how is neoclassicism accommodated within parallel cultural developments in Britain, among them Romanticism (a term actually current in the eighteenth century, unlike neoclassicism, coined only in the late nineteenth and used, interestingly enough, for Poussin's seventeenth-century paintings)? It might be pointed out that Coltman does not attempt to situate British neoclassicism within what Michel Foucault seminally characterized as the “Classical episteme” of the Enlightenment. For that, many readers will no doubt be grateful. But can we simply ignore Foucault's postulation of the linear relationship between sign and representation without asking (or indeed refuting) how this might have been borne out in the visual field?

It is precisely in the field of visuality that the book may be found most conspicuously wanting. The straightforward relationship that Coltman posits between classicism as intellectual exercise and neoclassicism as its material expression overwrites in its entirety the phenomenon's visual resources. Simply put, why does this obsession with the antique manifest itself in these particular visual ways, and why does it do so now? What sort of relationship extends between (what we call) neoclassicism in the visual arts and neoclassicism in other spheres—literature, philosophy, music, and so on? How, for that matter, should we explain the chronological disparities between neoclassicism in all its various guises? These are questions that go beyond the author's specific agenda: what Coltman sets out to do, she accomplishes with flair and panache. To my mind, though, what is gained by thinking about neoclassicism as a “style of thought” is lost in the failure materially and iconographically to engage with its imagery. In the end one has to wonder: might we do better discussing neoclassicism as a form of “decoration,” “taste,” and “style” after all?