This book is a general introduction to Greek sculpture, geared to undergraduates. Despite a new title and publisher, it is in effect a revised and expanded edition of S.’s Understanding Greek Sculpture of 1996. As the original volume received some highly critical reviews (e.g. O. Palagia, JHS 118 [1998], 245–7), one might have expected a full scale reworking, but such is not the case. Nearly every sentence has been recast but it is, in substance, the same book.

S. has obvious gifts as a teacher. He particularly excels at posing questions to draw his readers into discussion and to lead them from one topic to another, and he does not get bogged down in details. The writing style is self-consciously urbane, with quotations from Seamus Heaney, T.S. Eliot and the like to elevate the general tone; French and Italian catchphrases are salted throughout.

Doubtless some undergraduates would find this captivating, but errors of fact are so pervasive as to rule out classroom use. For instance, early Greek bronze casters did not use moulds made of ivory (p. 78), and the Hekatompedon on the Athenian Acropolis was not built ‘during Solon's time’, but c. 560 (p. 157). Korai cannot routinely represent matrons since they can be called ‘maiden’ in inscriptions, as Henri Lechat pointed out in 1903 (pp. 111–13). Kouros is a modern term for nude or semi-nude standing males of the Archaic period; it is misleading to apply it to a reclining, draped symposiast from Cerveteri (p. 80) or, even as a provocation, to the Motya Charioteer (here called ‘The Motya kouros’, p. 102). The Kleobis and Biton statues at Delphi were not ‘funerary monuments’ (p. 130) and the Large Pergamene Gauls did not stand on the acropolis of Pergamum (pp. 237–8). Mistakes from the first edition remain uncorrected. S. doggedly sticks to Cockerell's nineteenth-century reconstruction of the Aphaia pediment in preference to the products of modern scholarship (fig. 5.2). He still contradicts himself about the Laocoon group: was it destined for the Gardens of Maecenas c. 30 b.c. (p. 244), or commissioned by Nero (p. 291)? Worse, he now illustrates major monuments backwards, or ‘mirror-reversed’: the West pediment of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia (fig. 2.8), the Nike of Samothrace (fig. 9.12), the Great Altar of Pergamum (fig. 9.18), even the Apollo Belvedere (fig. 12.3). Others are mislabelled, for example S. confuses the Townley Discobolus in London with the Lancellotti in Rome and then misspells the Italian name (fig. 4.11 with pp. xiii, 103).

Erudite in tone, the book is very nearly reactionary in substance; S. is a fan of Sir Kenneth Clark, quoting him as an authority on several occasions, and overall displays the sort of genteel aestheticism that was once the bane of British art history. Most of the usual biases are present: large scale sculpture over small, marble and bronze over terracotta, named artists over anonymous craftsmen, Classical over Archaic and Hellenistic (no Geometric!), and Athens over all. A long chapter on the ‘Greek revolution’ never successfully defines its topic, but in the end repeats the traditional cant: the Classical style represents ‘the determination of Greek sculptors to reconcile the ideal with the natural’ (p. 51), an eighteenth-century piety that is strictly meaningless outside the framework of idealist philosophy. Having once denounced Meisterforschung as ‘charlatan’ and ‘cabbalistic’, S. restates his principled opposition to the very idea of Roman ‘copies’ (pp. xix–xx) – and then proceeds to discuss Polykleitos and Myron on the basis of Roman statuary, and generally to fetishise individual masters in almost Wagnerian terms (pp. 103–5, 290) (cf. S., GRBS 44 [1997], 241–2). Chapter 7 is about Pheidias, a ‘genius’ on the Romantic model; the only way to ‘rationalize’ such ‘men of vision’ is by comparison with Michelangelo, another ‘superhuman genius’ (pp. 184–5). As often, such romanticism is the flip side of a crude nationalism: when discussing the finds from Naukratis, S. considers the burning question to be whether or not they exhibit an ‘essential “Greekness”’ even though they come from Egypt (p. 119). The question is ill-formed, but it receives an answer: yes, there is an ‘essential “Greekness”’, and the trained eye can discern it even on the banks of the Nile. This is unedifying: at the very moment that Greek nationalists are beating up African immigrants in the Peloponnese, S. blithely endorses ethnic essentialism. Here as elsewhere, it is as though the aim were not to challenge preconceptions but to reaffirm them.

Historical context is essentially literary, not archaeological. S. habitually retrojects later authors into earlier contexts, preferring Pollitt's sourcebook to CEG I or the corpus of Archaic poetry (J.J. Pollitt, The Art of Ancient Greece: Sources and Documents [1990]; P. Hansen [ed.], Carmina epigraphica Graeca saeculorum VIII–V a.Chr.n. [1983]). It is an intrinsically uncritical approach, presupposing a timeless, unified Classical Age, and it renders S. incapable of relating the monuments to historical circumstance in any meaningful way. On the one hand, we are shown how style changes over time; on the other, statements from any one period apply to all the others, so there is no difference between the sixth century b.c.e. and the Second Sophistic. Something has to give.

In handling texts, S. gives credence even to tall tales, like Plutarch on a Stakhanovite donkey at Athens, and repeatedly misquotes or misuses his authors (p. 186). It is not the case, for instance, that ‘statues like the Riace Bronzes may be what Plato intended when he gave his blessing to “images of excellence” (eidôla aretês, Rep. 600e4)’, for that passage refers to Homer, not statues of any sort, and anyway Plato was not blessing but condemning (p. 37). Stesichorus did not say that Actaeon spied Artemis at her bath, but that he tried to marry Semele (fr. 236), so his version has nothing to do with ‘Female nakedness, nudity and taboo’ or Temple E at Selinus; S. has conflated him with Ovid (p. 201). It is not true that ‘The first public portraits, according to Pliny (NH 34.16–17), were the images of Harmodios and Aristogeiton’, for in that very passage Pliny describes an antecedent tradition of victor statues, as S. knows perfectly well (p. 254). Etcetera.

Illustrations consist largely of amateur snapshots taken in galleries: dark, poorly framed and out of focus. Those at the beginning of each chapter have been crudely Photoshopped, leaving ragged, pixelated contours to the statues (the poor Blond Boy gets a carbuncle on the tip of his nose, p. 1). Curiously, S. illustrates a number of works with his own impromptu sketches instead of photographs; one can only wonder why. The first example appears immediately after an approving quotation of the Nazi art historian Ernst Buschor (banned from teaching after 1945, though S. neglects to mention it) gushing over a horse from the East pediment of the Parthenon; S. remarks, ‘It is difficult not to feel the same way while drawing the piece, as artists often have’, and offers his own effort as proof (pp. 18–19). The sketches, in short, are displays of sensibility; clear documentation of the monuments (not to mention Buschor's real agenda) is secondary to the performance of an artistic temperament.

There are bright spots. Chapter 3 is a fine overview of sculptural technology, Chapter 8 a balanced discussion of the Aphrodite of Knidos. Just because they are admirable, however, these chapters heighten the sense of an opportunity missed. At his best, S. resists the pressure to subordinate Greek art to political, social or religious history. His impulse is good, even important. But it is difficult to act upon it within Classical Studies as presently configured. One lesson of this volume may be that the field's intellectual options have narrowed to the point that one of the few alternatives to narrow historical scholarship is a retreat into middlebrow aestheticism. If so, then we must all do better.