This recent entry in the Oxford Handbooks series lives up to the claim on the dust jacket that ‘each volume offers an authoritative and state-of-the-art survey of current thinking and research in a particular subject area’. In the case of Roman sculpture there are forty-one essays grouped in six thematic categories. Part I (an odd prioritisation) deals with ‘collecting, conservation and display’ and includes papers on restoration, collecting in early America, current trends in museum display and three-dimensional scanning and modelling. Part II concentrates on ‘production and distribution’, with papers on marble quarries, carving techniques, bronzes, terracottas, polychromy and transport. Part III looks at ‘styles and genres’, with chapters on Etruscan and Greek connections, portraiture, monumental reliefs, archaism and eclecticism, Egyptianising monuments and late Antique sculpture. Part IV tackles ‘spatial and social contexts’, with chapters on architectural settings, religious dedications, domestic displays, funerary monuments, epigraphy and patronage, and gender. Part V turns from the centre of the empire to ‘regions and provinces’ – specifically northern Gaul, Germany and Britain, Spain and Narbonensis, North Africa, Greece, Asia Minor, Egypt and the Near East (the Balkan and Danube provinces are omitted). Part VI, finally, is on ‘viewing and reception’, with interesting articles on aesthetics and Latin literary reception (by Michael Squire, one of the highlights of the volume), reception theory, ancient analogues of museums, images of statues in other media, human interactions with statues and iconoclasm.

Different papers adopt different policies. Some try to be comprehensive and generalising, others focus on selected examples. Some are matter of fact surveys; others tend to be theoretical analyses. What all have in common is a tightness engendered by clear remits and rigidly imposed word limits. Each author has conformed to a similar structure of headed sections, followed by a full and up-to-date bibliography, and each is restricted to fifteen or sixteen pages. The fact that all the contributors have kept to the guidelines is a tribute to the firmness and efficiency of the editing. There are also remarkably few misprints and typing errors (though some writers are less careful than others in giving references). All this is to be applauded. However, there are a couple of caveats regarding the volume’s stated role as a handbook. First, the illustrations are too sparse, especially in chapters that cite numerous examples: most contributions make do with only four or five pictures, some with only one or two (or with none at all). Second, this is no volume for beginners: it presupposes that its readers will have a grounding in Roman history and culture (technical terms such as cupae, paludamentum and suovetaurilia go unexplained) and will also be able to cope with sophisticated arguments and language that sometimes verges on gobbledegook (‘This elite/non-elite dichotomy … is both reductive and essentialising’). The interested layman may frequently be left floundering.

Accepted that it aims at an initiated readership, this volume offers a valuable compendium of current scholarship on Roman sculpture. For instance, it brings together the latest evidence from scientific analyses of marbles and other stones that have enabled these materials to be ascribed to specific quarries, thus shedding clearer light on patterns of exploitation and distribution. In an important contribution on stone-carving techniques, Amanda Claridge both demolishes the myth of the ‘running drill’ (p 108) and claims that the introduction of light-reflecting drill-holes in the pupils of the eyes did not necessarily indicate an absence of paint (p 109) (here the reviewer is not entirely convinced, since the presence of the holes would seem to make the use of colour redundant). Other important contributions include Eric R Varner on the reuse and re-carving of imperial portraits, a practice which the author believes had ideological value, being designed either to suppress the memory of a ‘bad’ emperor or to link the new incumbent with a ‘good’ emperor of the past (pp 132–3: but such meanings can hardly have been obvious to the viewer when every effort was made to conceal the original sitter’s appearance).

Enough said. This Oxford Handbook amply summarises the latest research and debates on Roman sculpture, and no specialist in the field can afford to be without it.