This collection of essays aims to present an up-to-date guide to the study of Greek and Roman art and architecture, with an emphasis on theory, methodology and historiography. It thus provides a rather different perspective from the more descriptive surveys found in the rival Blackwell Companions: there are no chapters devoted to individual genres or types of art and architecture, and instead the essays explore various key themes, methods and theories, including traditional approaches such as connoisseurship and formal analysis alongside newer ideas such as gender, agency and reception. The target audience is postgraduates and academics, but many of the chapters would also be suitable for undergraduates. A particular strength is the international profile of the authors, who include both established and early-career scholars, representing a variety of different academic traditions.

The volume consists of thirty chapters, grouped into five thematic sections. Most of the chapters consider Greek and Roman art or architecture together, not simply for reasons of economy, but, as M. explains in the introduction, because we see so much Greek production through the filter of Roman taste. The authors' approaches to their topics vary: some attempt to present a broad survey or narrative, while others adopt a more discursive approach, centred on selected issues or case studies. It is impossible to discuss every contribution in a short review; I can only highlight a few chapters in each section that I found particularly interesting or potentially useful for teaching purposes, but all are informative and offer much food for thought.

The authors in the first section attempt to see ancient art and architecture from the inside, from the perspective of the Greeks and Romans themselves, drawing on written sources and ancient images of artworks and buildings. The first pair of chapters, on ancient theories of art and architecture, might be useful in helping students to set aside their own expectations of art and appreciate how differently an ancient viewer would have responded to it. In the absence of surviving theoretical literature on art, D. Steiner uses literary descriptions of artefacts to tease out the qualities that ancient (primarily Greek) viewers valued in works of art. In the corresponding chapter on architectural theory, M. Wilson Jones analyses the aesthetic principles set out by Vitruvius and other ancient authors, giving a very accessible explanation of the difficult Latin and Greek abstract terms that they use; he then goes on to consider how far actual practice matched theory.

Part 2 focuses on the production of art and architecture, looking at the workers who made it, the patrons who commissioned it, and the techniques and materials that they used. R. Vollkommer's wide-ranging prosopographical survey of artists reveals the biases in our knowledge through a series of statistical tables, based on his work for the Künstlerlexikon der Antike, which show how many artists' names are known in each medium, how they have been transmitted (through texts, signatures or both), and when and where the artists worked; sculptors dominate the known names, and Greeks significantly outnumber Romans. H. von Hesberg's chapter on ancient architects approaches the topic from a different angle, analysing the role of the architect in designing and constructing buildings, while E.R. Varner attempts to tease out the roles of artist and patron in the light of recent debates on agency.

Part 3 looks at the ancient contexts of art and architecture; appropriately, this is the only section where some chapters cover Greek and Roman art separately. Thus O. Palagia and P. Zanker discuss the functions of Greek and Roman art respectively; Palagia presents a broadly chronological survey of the uses of sculpture and painting, while Zanker uses some illuminating case studies to show how art was used as a form of self-representation in different public and private settings. Another pair of chapters, by J. Mylonopoulos and R. Neudecker, considers the role of art in buildings and rituals in Greek and Roman contexts: Mylonopoulos focuses on the religious functions of images, whereas Neudecker interprets ‘ritual’ more broadly to include not just religion, but also social rituals such as bathing and banqueting. The final two chapters in this section might be particularly useful for students: R. Kousser gives a very clear account of the reception of Greek art in Rome and the implications for our view of both Greek and Roman art, while N. Kampen examines the historiography of Roman art in the provinces and deftly shows how it is entangled with modern ideas of nationalism and imperialism.

Part 4 examines ancient art and architecture in post-antique contexts, with chapters tracing the reception of ancient art from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, its historiography from antiquity to the present, and the history of modern collecting and display. Any of the chapters in this section would be useful and accessible for students, even at undergraduate level. J.H. Stubbs' chapter on the conservation of architecture from antiquity to the present considers an important topic that is usually overlooked in handbooks of this sort; it is a pity that there is no corresponding chapter on the conservation of artworks. B. Cohen traces the development of museum display from early modern private collections to the major museums of the twenty-first century, emphasising how political concerns and changes in taste shape display practices, and conversely how museum displays can shape our perception of individual artworks, potentially elevating them to ‘superstar’ status. M.M. Miles provides a clear and succinct account of the history of collecting and modern debates over cultural property, ending with a discussion of recent measures to stem the flow of looted antiquities.

Finally, Part 5 explores various approaches to ancient art: connoisseurship, formal analysis, iconography and iconology, sociohistorical and anthropological approaches, gender, reception, semiotics and agency. This section might be useful for an advanced course on approaches to art, though some of the authors assume more prior knowledge than others (an explicit definition of connoisseurship would have been helpful to students, for example), and some have opted for a more historiographical account, outlining the history of their approach, rather than showing how it can be applied in practice. I particularly liked C. Kunze's chapter on style, a topic that has fallen out of favour recently as a result of the trend towards focusing on the content and context of artworks rather than their form; he makes a good case for the continuing value of formal analysis and the potential for stylistic changes to illuminate wider historical developments. Obviously a single volume cannot cover every possible topic, but one increasingly important and productive approach that perhaps deserved a chapter in its own right is scientific analysis of materials, which is only given a brief mention in K. Lapatin's account of techniques and materials in Part 2.

The volume is not lavishly illustrated, but the black-and-white illustrations are sufficient for their purpose. Latin, Greek and other foreign terms are mostly translated or glossed, though not always, which might frustrate anglophone students. One minor irritation is the in-text referencing style, which was perhaps not the best choice for a volume whose function is essentially to review work on the topic: in some chapters the flow of the text is disrupted by long lists of references and bibliographic discussions, which would have been better relegated to footnotes. But despite these niggles, this is a rich collection of information, ideas and directions for future research.